Thread: proposed sweeping powers for fair trading inspectors

Originally Posted by ramblingboy42

depends who's in power and what value the upper house is to them.....Paul Keating called it "unrepresentative swill" , if I remember correctly.

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

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

Some other prominente, I forget who, referred to the Senate as the best club in Australia. I prefer Keating's version, given that it always appears to be full of seat warmers and ratbags.