Originally Posted by
JDNSW
I think you remember correctly - but he was talking about the Senate, which almost always is a much closer representation of the voting pattern than is the House of Representatives.
At abolition the Qld upper house was fully appointed (effectively by the government of the day, but they could not get rid of those appointed by the previous government).
These days I think the main distinction of the state upper houses is that they have longer terms (e.g. NSW elects half at a time), so that the composition of the upper house reflects long term trends rather than short lived landslide victories. They also often have multimember electorates - for example, currently NSW has the whole state as an electorate, giving proportional representation, arguably much more representative than the single member electorates of the lower house.
John
