Julia 2010: The Caretaker Election, edited by Marian Simms and John Wanna, is the latest of the regular post-election analyses by a group of Australia’s leading political scientists. It provides a comprehensive coverage of one of Australia’s most historic elections, which produced a hung parliament and a carefully crafted minority government that remains a heartbeat away from collapse, as well as Australia’s first elected woman Prime Minister and the Australian Greens’ first lower house Member of Parliament. Contributors include the Audit’s Brian Costar and Marian Sawer.
Balancing act: the Australian Greens 2008–2011, a new paper by Joy McCann for the Australian Parliamentary Library, presents a brief introduction to the structure, ideological underpinnings and policies of the Australian Greens, and includes a brief history of the development of Green politics internationally and in Australia. It focuses on the party’s electoral fortunes and parliamentary activities from 2008 to the end of the first year of the 43rd Commonwealth Parliament.
The federal government has introduced two related bills, the Electoral and Referendum (Maintaining Address) Bill and the Electoral and Referendum (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill, which seek to introduce direct enrolment systems for federal elections. The bills are now at second reading stage. The Audit’s submission to the inquiry into the first of the bills by the Joint Selection Committee on Electoral Matters is available here, and the committee’s report will shortly be published here. The committee’s inquiry into the Electoral and Referendum (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill is under way.
The Australian Electoral Commission released its annual disclosure of information about political donations and expenditure for the 2010–11 year on 30 January 2012. The Audit’s Graeme Orr and Brian Costar discussed the data and its limitations in this article for Inside Story.
On 15 February a NSW Legislative Council select committee reported on its inquiry into the provisions of the Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Amendment Bill 2011, which set out to ban all donations to political parties by organisations (including unions). Although the report proposed a number of amendments, the bill was introduced on the same day, and proceeded to pass through parliament with the support of the Greens. Unions in NSW have indicated that they are considering a High Court challenge. The constitutional implications of the ban are discussed in this report from the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service.
The report of the federal government’s expert panel on recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution was released on 19 January. The panel made five recommendations for constitutional amendment: the removal of section 25; the repeal of section 51(xxvi); the creation of a new head of power with respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; the inclusion of a prohibition on racial discrimination; and the insertion of a provision recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In Inside Story, Paul Kildea from the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of NSW discussed the recommendations and their prospects for implementation, while the Audit’s Brian Costar focused on the history of the controversial Section 25 of the constitution.
