Bill Browne is Director of the Democracy & Accountability Program. His diverse areas of interest include the use of opinion polling, forecasting to predict policy outcomes, truth in political advertising reforms, digital technology and the role of the states and the Senate in Australian democracy.
In the last couple of weeks, two very consequential political debates have come down to a single vote. And these two narrow defeats prove that individuals matter, democracy matters, and parliament matters. Nothing is predetermined.
On the 10th of September 1996, two very different politicians rose at the same time to give their first speeches to Parliament, Bob Brown and Pauline Hanson. The Greens and One Nation have become fixtures of Australian politics. The Greens have almost always had more electoral success and many more parliamentarians than One Nation.
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Earlier this year, an Australia Institute freedom of information (FOI) request revealed that the Attorney-General’s Department had been holding back information from the public. Their apparent motive was to escape tricky questions at Senate Estimates, the rare opportunity that democratically elected representatives get to ask questions of government officials.
ABC’s Political Editor Jacob Greber said on 730 that the Greens’ decision on how to vote on the carbon credit method’s disallowance motion is “reprising memories of another hard-fought battle over climate policy”, the vote on the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) in 2009. What does a vote 17 years ago have to do with next week’s disallowance motion, and what lessons might the Greens take from the CPRS history?
There are about 22 million adults living in Australia, but at the 2025 federal election fewer than 16 million votes were counted. What happened to the other six million adults? This explainer goes through the voting process to explain who gets counted.
If democracy is to thrive in the 21st century, people power must grow relative to corporate influence. Regulating corporate lobbyists is worth doing for its own sake, but it will not reduce the power and selfishness of the vested interests behind those lobbyists, nor will it expose corruption or restore confidence in government.
The Liberal–National Opposition is in a difficult parliamentary position. Still smarting from the worst result in Liberal Party history, they are not a live threat as an alternative government to a Labor Party that holds almost two in every three seats. Nor has the party distinguished itself on policy.
Politicians who are concerned about greenwashing and due process have the power to stop the dodgy national parks deal later this month, but only if a range of senators vote together. Luckily for those opposed to the creation of even more carbon offsets, the Senate has a long tradition of unlikely senators coming together to agree that a minister’s latest idea is a bad one.
Parties often encourage or compel their elected MPs (and sometimes their political staff) to pay a contribution to the party out of their parliamentary salary. It’s called “the tithe” or a “levy”. These levies are often exempt from donation caps, giving the major political parties an uncapped stream of revenue while new entrants have to raise money through small donations.
