government, with a majority of around a hundred, had to abandon contro-
versial legislation on industrial relations in the face of backbench protest.
The Canadian Senate is, in law, co-equal with the House of Commons, with
the usual qualifications concerningfinancial legislation. Clashes between the
two Houses are rare, but have been overcome, in extreme situations, by
appointment of additional senators. There is no formal dispute resolution
procedure and, as the Senate cannot be dissolved, there can be no simultan-
eous refreshment of the membership of the two Houses as in Australia.
Members of the Australian House of Representatives are elected by single-
member electorates as occurs for the Houses of Commons in the UK and
Canada. In Australia, voting is compulsory and preferential. In both the UK
and Canada, voting is voluntary andfirst-past-the-post. The effect of the two
approaches is difficult to specify but it does appear that the Australian
approach means smaller swings of the pendulum so far as parliamentary
seats are concerned; this, however, is a proposition which needs to be tested
further as distribution of the vote may be a factor in the smaller swings.
In Australia, both the Senate and the House of Representatives have been
elected on an adult franchise virtually since their inception (and certainly
from the second federal election in 1903). The Senate is elected on a state-wide
basis (or territory-wide in the case of the two territories). Unless there is a
double dissolution, senators from the states havefixed terms of six years; half
the Senate is elected every three years. Senate elections must be held in the
year preceding commencement of senators’terms and usually coincide with
general elections for the House of Representatives (separate periodical elec-
tions of senators have only been held in 1953, 1964, 1967, and 1970). Mem-
bership of the Senate in Ottawa is by appointment; the House of Lords retains
a small hereditary component.
All three second chambers have been the subject of much debate through-
out the twentieth century. For half a century, 1920 to 1978, the ALP’s
platform included abolition of the Senate. It now favours simply limiting
the Senate’spowersrelatingtoappropriationlegislation, in particular as a
consequence of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in November
1975, when the Senate refused to vote on appropriation legislation until an
election was called.
For thefirst half-century of the Commonwealth, the method of electing
senators saw the creation of some very lopsided Senates; in 1913 the Liberal
government had only seven seats in a thirty-six-seat Senate, the remainder
were all held by the ALP. The numbers were reversed after the Great War, with
the Nationalist government holding thirty-five of the thirty-six seats; and
from 1947 to 1949, the Labor government held thirty-three seats.
In 1948 a system of proportional voting was adopted at the time when the
number of seats in the Senate was increased to sixty (it is now seventy-six,
J. R. Nethercote