Australia's politics: a British cabinet inside an American federation

How Australians are made to vote

Voting in federal elections has been compulsory since 1924, and enrolment since 1911. Under federal electoral law, the Australian Electoral Commission states, every eligible citizen must enrol and vote in federal elections, by-elections and referendums. Wikipedia's account of Australian politics gives the penalty for not voting as a $20 fine. Aboriginal Australians received the federal vote without restriction in 1962, but voting remained optional for them until 1984, when enrolment and voting both became compulsory.

The ballot itself is ranked. Members of the House of Representatives are elected in single-member seats by full preferential voting: electors number every candidate, and the winner needs more than 50% of the vote once the preferences of the lower-placed candidates are distributed. Senators are elected by the single transferable vote, a form of proportional representation in which a party's seats follow its share of the vote more closely.

Compulsion shapes how elections are run. The Electoral Commission takes the ballot to voters who cannot reach a polling place: at the 1999 referendum its 462 mobile teams visited 2,130 hospitals and nursing homes and took 78,600 votes, and other teams visited 13 prisons and remand centres. Federal elections must be held at least once every three years on a date the governor-general sets at the government's request, and every national election since 1974 has been held for both houses together.

Britannica calls Australia a pioneer in election law, and the sources date its early reforms differently. Britannica credits Victoria with introducing the secret ballot in 1855 and South Australia with giving women the vote in 1892. Wikipedia's history of Australia puts the secret ballot in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia in 1856 and women's suffrage in South Australia in 1895. Britannica adds that the secret ballot is generally called the Australian ballot.

How the constitution borrowed from two models

The constitution was drafted at conventions in 1891 and 1897 to 1898 and passed as an act of the British Parliament in 1900. The National Museum of Australia traces its first draft to the Tasmanian delegate Andrew Inglis Clark, who drew on the United States constitution as well as British acts, and the result is the hybrid known as Washminster.

From Westminster came responsible government: the prime minister and ministers sit in parliament and hold office while they keep the confidence of the lower house. The document itself does not mention the prime minister or the cabinet. Both exist by convention, as they did in the unwritten British constitution that the drafters assumed. From Washington came a written constitution, a federation with listed Commonwealth powers, a strong elected upper house and a High Court that rules on disputes between the Commonwealth and the states.

Section 51 lists what the federal parliament may legislate on, among them defence, interstate trade and bankruptcy. Everything not listed stays with the states, each of which has its own constitution, so that Australia has seven parliaments with legislative power shared among them. The High Court has seven justices and has been the final court of appeal since the Australia Act 1986 ended appeals to the Privy Council in London.

How the Senate checks the government

The two chambers are elected on different principles, and the difference was the price of federation. The House of Representatives reflects population, so New South Wales returns 48 members and Tasmania five. The Senate gives every state the same weight, so that laws cannot pass on the support of the populous states alone.

Britannica gives the House 150 members; Wikipedia's politics article gives 150 in one passage and 151 in another. Each chamber has equal powers except that the Senate may not introduce bills that raise taxes or authorise spending.

Because a Senate seat needs a smaller quota than a House seat, minor parties and independents concentrate on the upper house. No party or coalition has held a Senate majority since 1981 except for the three years from 2005 to 2008, so governments pass contested legislation by bargaining with the crossbench. When the two houses deadlock, the governor-general can dissolve both; the Electoral Commission cites the double dissolutions of 1987 and 2016, when all 76 Senate seats were contested.

How the governor-general dismissed a government

The monarch's functions are almost entirely formal, and Britannica describes them as exercised in Australia by a governor-general and six state governors who are appointed on the recommendation of Australian governments. Parliament gave Elizabeth II the title Queen of Australia by the Royal Style and Titles Act 1953, and in 1973 removed the references to her other crowns. The governor-general acts on ministerial advice but keeps reserve powers, and those were used once in a way that still defines the office.

In 1975 the opposition coalition, holding the Senate, delayed the government's money bills after the Loans Affair and demanded an election. The prime minister, Gough Whitlam, refused. On 11 November 1975 the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismissed him and appointed the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, caretaker prime minister until an election. The coalition won that election in December by a landslide. Wikipedia's politics article records that the Senate's power to block supply has been used to that effect only in 1975. Britannica notes that American and British intelligence involvement was widely alleged afterwards and that the event set off lasting debate about the powers of the governor-general.

A republic went to a referendum in 1999. The model on offer would have replaced the governor-general with a president nominated by the prime minister and approved by two-thirds of both houses of parliament. It was defeated, carrying a majority only in the Australian Capital Territory, and the Australian Republican Movement and the monarchist organisations have both continued to campaign since.

Why the constitution rarely changes

An amendment needs a double majority: a majority of all voters, and a majority of voters in a majority of states, which means at least four of the six.

The referendum of 27 May 1967 shows the exception. Both sides of parliament backed the removal of the constitution's two exclusions of Aboriginal people, no national No case was put, and nearly 91% voted Yes. The two recent proposals ran the other way. In 1999 the republic failed in every state. On 14 October 2023 a proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a Voice to Parliament won 39.9% of formal votes and no state, and the Parliamentary Education Office records it as the first referendum of the twenty-first century. The constitution has governed without interruption since 1901.

How the High Court decides what the constitution means

Australia has one common law for the whole country, inherited from England, and most courts are state courts: each state has a hierarchy of courts that ends in its supreme court, and those courts hear most federal matters as well as state ones. Above them stands the High Court, created under section 71 of the constitution and constituted by the Judiciary Act 1903. It hears appeals from every other court, decides disputes between the Commonwealth and the states and between the states themselves, and rules on whether a law passed by any Australian parliament is within its constitutional power.

Because the constitution requires the separation of powers at the federal level, only courts may exercise the judicial power of the Commonwealth, and courts may not be given other functions. Two of its decisions reshaped the federation without a referendum. It approved the Commonwealth's takeover of income tax in 1942, and in the Mabo case of 1992 it recognised native title and set aside the doctrine that the continent had belonged to nobody in 1788.

How power is split between Canberra and the states

The states run most of what residents meet day to day: police, hospitals, schools and public transport. The Commonwealth holds defence, foreign affairs, immigration and interstate trade, and above all it raises most of the money. In 1942 it took over income tax from the states with the High Court's approval, and Wikipedia's politics article describes the result as a high degree of vertical fiscal imbalance. The states raise less revenue than they spend, and the Commonwealth fills the gap with grants, often tied to conditions, which gives it influence over fields the constitution left to the states.

Each state has a governor, a premier and its own supreme court. All the state parliaments have two chambers except Queensland's, and state elections fall every four years on fixed dates except in Tasmania, where the premier chooses the date. The Northern Territory became self-governing in 1978 and the Australian Capital Territory in 1988, but their legislatures exercise powers the Commonwealth devolved, and the federal parliament can override them. Norfolk Island governed itself from 1979 until 2015. Local government is a third tier created by state law, in the form of councils, shires and cities.

Who wins seats beyond the two blocs

Federal politics has been a contest between the Australian Labor Party and a non-Labor bloc since the parties coalesced in 1909. The non-Labor side is a coalition: the Liberal Party, founded in 1944 under Robert Menzies, and the National Party, formerly the Country Party, which draws its vote from rural seats. In Queensland the two have merged as the Liberal National Party, and in the Northern Territory the Country Liberal Party is affiliated with both. Britannica records that the coalition formed the federal government for most of the years after 1949.

The two blocs have been losing their share of the vote. Minor parties and independents took 8% of first-preference votes in the 1980 federal election, and Wikipedia's politics article puts their combined primary vote at 34% in 2025. The 2022 election returned six minor-party members and ten independents to the House of Representatives, many of the independents in seats previously held by moderate Liberals. The Australian Greens, the largest of the minor parties since 2004 by Wikipedia's account, hold most of their seats in the Senate, where Britannica notes that proportional voting gives minor parties better representation.

Who Australia stands with abroad

The alliance with the United States is the fixed point. Diplomatic relations were established on 8 January 1940, and the Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty, ANZUS, was signed in 1951. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade names ANZUS and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement of 2004 as the centre of the relationship. On 16 September 2021 Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States announced AUKUS, under which Australia cancelled a 2016 contract for French-designed diesel-electric submarines. The three agreed in March 2023 on what the Australian Submarine Agency calls the Optimal Pathway, and the agency expects Australia to receive its first Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine from the United States in the early 2030s.

The region comes next. Australia administered Papua from 1902 and New Guinea from 1914, and granted Papua New Guinea independence on 16 September 1975. On 6 October 2025 the two signed a mutual defence treaty, which the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade publishes under its informal name, the Pukpuk Treaty. The Hawke government helped form Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 1989, and in 2017 Australia joined the United States, Japan and India in reviving the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Australia led a United Nations force into East Timor in 1999 and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in the early 2000s.