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.
Recent and proposed changes to electoral laws at both the national and state levels risk perverse and unfair outcomes. Sometimes these are called “unintended consequences”, but that is too generous to politicians who are often fully aware of what they are doing.
Political commentators say that the change in leader will make things harder for the Albanese Government. But did the Greens’ more forceful negating strategy under Bandt hold back Labor’s agenda? If not, it is unclear why Shoebridge would be any different.
Could big spending explain the success of the independents at the ACT election? New data from the ACT Electoral Commission shows this isn't the case.
Both last year’s Productivity Commission’s figures and Treasury’s in the Intergenerational Report this week promise enough benefits from AI to roughly maintain the status quo, but not so profound an improvement that you might start to worry life will be completely different in 2046 than it is today.
It’s perfectly legal to lie in a political ad in NSW – but that could be about to change. More than 31,500 NSW residents have said that they want truth in political advertising laws before the state election next March.
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.
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?
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