![]() | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
All 17 seats of the unicameral Legislative Assembly | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly were held on Saturday, 18 October 2008. The incumbent Labor Party, led by Jon Stanhope, was challenged by the Liberal Party, led by Zed Seselja. Candidates were elected to fill three multi-member electorates using a single transferable vote method, known as the Hare-Clark system. The result was another hung parliament with Labor winning seven seats, the Liberals six seats and the Greens finishing with four seats, giving the Greens the balance of power in the 17-member unicameral Assembly. [1] [2] [3] [4] On 31 October 2008, after almost two weeks of deliberations, the Greens chose to support a Labor minority government. [5] [6] [7] Consequently, Labor was re-elected to a third consecutive term of government in the ACT. Stanhope was elected Chief Minister at the first sitting of the seventh Assembly on 5 November 2008. [8]
The Australian Labor Party , commonly known as ACT Labor, is the ACT branch of the Australian Labor Party. It is one of two major parties in the unicameral Parliament of the Australian Capital Territory.
Jonathan Donald Stanhope is a former Australian politician who was Labor Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory from 2001 to 2011. Stanhope represented the Ginninderra electorate in the ACT Legislative Assembly from 1998 until 2011. He is the only ACT Chief Minister to have governed with a majority in the ACT Assembly. From 2012 to 2014 Stanhope was Administrator of the Australian Indian Ocean Territories, which consists of Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
Zdenko Matthew "Zed" Seselja is an Australian politician who has been a Senator for the Australian Capital Territory since 2013, representing the Liberal Party. He was previously a member of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly from 2004 to 2013, and served as leader of the Canberra Liberals and Leader of the Opposition from 2007 to 2013.
The electoral roll is a list of persons who are eligible to vote in a particular electoral district and who are registered to vote, if required in a particular jurisdiction. An electoral roll has a number of functions, especially to streamline voting on election day. Voter registration is also used to combat electoral fraud by enabling authorities to verify an applicant's identity and entitlement to a vote, and to ensure a person doesn't vote multiple times. In jurisdictions where voting is compulsory, the electoral roll is used to indicate who has failed to vote. Most jurisdictions maintain permanent electoral rolls while some jurisdictions compile new electoral rolls before each election. In some jurisdictions, people to be selected for jury or other civil duties are chosen from an electoral roll.
The incumbent centre-left Labor Party, led by Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, attempted to win re-election for a third term after coming to power in 2001. They were challenged by the opposition centre-right Liberal Party, led by Zed Seselja, who assumed the Liberal leadership in December 2007. A third party, the ACT Greens, held one seat in the Assembly through retiring MLA Deb Foskey.
The ACT Greens is a green political party located in the Australian Capital Territory, and a member of the federation of the Australian Greens.
Deb Foskey is a former Australian politician with the ACT Greens.
The election saw all 17 members of the Assembly face re-election, with members being elected by the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation. The Assembly is divided into three electorates: five-member Brindabella (including Tuggeranong and parts of the Woden Valley) and Ginninderra (including Belconnen and suburbs) and seven-member Molonglo (including North Canberra, South Canberra, Gungahlin, Weston Creek, and the remainder of the Woden Valley). Election dates are set in statute to occur once every four years; the government has no ability to set the election date.
Proportional representation (PR) characterizes electoral systems in which divisions in an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. If n% of the electorate support a particular political party, then roughly n% of seats will be won by that party. The essence of such systems is that all votes contribute to the result - not just a plurality, or a bare majority. The most prevalent forms of proportional representation all require the use of multiple-member voting districts, as it is not possible to fill a single seat in a proportional manner. In fact, the implementations of PR that achieve the highest levels of proportionality tend to include districts with large numbers of seats.
The Brindabella electorate is one of the five electorates for the unicameral 25-member Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly. It elects five members, and is the largest of the electorates in geographic area.
The District of Tuggeranong is one of the original eighteen districts of the Australian Capital Territory used in land administration. The district is subdivided into divisions (suburbs), sections and blocks and is the southernmost town centre of Canberra, the capital city of Australia. The district comprises nineteen suburbs and occupies 117 square kilometres (45 sq mi) to the east of the Murrumbidgee River.
Following the 2004 election outcome, Labor held 9 seats, becoming the first majority government in the territory's history. The opposition Liberal Party held 7 seats, with the Greens holding a further one. The Liberal numbers in the Assembly dropped to six in December 2007 when former Shadow Treasurer Richard Mulcahy was expelled from the party and began sitting as an independent. The opposition thus would have needed to win a further three seats, on top of regaining Mulcahy's seat, to hold government in its own right.
A majority government refers to one or multiple governing parties that hold an absolute majority of seats in legislature. This is as opposed to a minority government, where the largest party in a legislature only has a plurality of seats.
Richard John Mulcahy, a former Australian politician, was a member of the unicameral Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly for one term, from 2004 to 2008, representing the Liberal Party and later as an independent.
The Liberal campaign suffered early problems in February 2008 when a number of prominent Liberal Party and business figures, including popular former Chief Minister Kate Carnell and high-profile businessman and former party finance director Jim Murphy, relaunched the 250 Club, previously a Liberal fundraising group, as the independent Canberra Business Club. The new organisation pledged to support minor party and independent pro-business candidates in the election, citing their disillusion with both major parties and the need for a third political force in the Assembly. [10] At the same time, their best prospect for winning Mulcahy's seat of Molonglo, the Liberal Candidate for Fraser in the previous Federal election, withdrew.[ citation needed ]
Anne Katherine Carnell is an Australian businesswoman and former Liberal Party politician, who served as the third Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) from 1995 to 2000.
A minor party is a political party that plays a smaller role than a major party in a country's politics and elections. The difference between minor and major parties can be so great that the membership total, donations, and the candidates that they are able to produce or attract are very distinct. Some of the minor parties play almost no role in a country's politics because of their low recognition, vote and donations. Minor parties often receive very small numbers of votes at an election. The method of voting can also assist or hinder a minor party's chances. For example, in an election for more than one member, the proportional representation method of voting can be advantageous to a minor party as can preference allocation from one or both of the major parties.
Conducted by Patterson Market Research, and published in The Canberra Times, polling released on 4 October suggested the Green vote had doubled to tripled since the last election, at the expense of Labor, with the Liberal vote relatively unchanged. Commentators predicted the Greens would hold the balance of power and decide who forms government. The Greens stated they were willing to court both major parties. [11] [12] [13]
In the 2001 and 2004 elections, after the first manual count of paper ballots the preferences were data entered for distribution. For the 2008 election, paper ballots were scanned and character recognition software used to identify preferences. Any preferences that could not be identified by the software were entered manually. [14]
[15] Sitting members at the time of the election are in bold. Tickets that elected at least one MLA are highlighted in the relevant colour. Successful candidates are indicated by an asterisk (*).
Five seats were up for election. The Labor Party was defending three seats. The Liberal Party was defending two seats.
Labor Candidates | Liberal Candidates | Greens Candidates | Motorist Candidates | CAP Candidates |
---|---|---|---|---|
Joy Burch* | Steve Doszpot* | Amanda Bresnan* | Ben Doble | Val Jeffery |
Five seats were up for election. The Labor Party was defending three seats. The Liberal Party was defending two seats.
Labor Candidates | Liberal Candidates | Greens Candidates | Motorist Candidates | CAP Candidates | Ungrouped Candidates |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Chris Bourke | Alistair Coe* | James Higgins | Deborah Hannigan | Mike Crowther | Harold Hird (Ind) |
Seven seats were up for election. The Labor Party was defending three seats. The Liberal Party was defending three seats. The Greens were defending one seat.
Labor Candidates | Liberal Candidates | Greens Candidates | Motorist Candidates | CAP Candidates |
---|---|---|---|---|
Andrew Barr * | Belinda Barnier | Elena Kirschbaum | David Cumbers | Alvin Hopper |
Mulcahy Candidates | LDP Candidates | Pangallo Candidates | Ungrouped Candidates | |
Joanne Allen | David McAlary | Luciano Lombardo | Helen Cross (Ind) |
Australian Capital Territory general election, 18 October 2008 [20] | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Enrolled voters | 243,471 | |||||
Votes cast | 220,019 | Turnout | 90.4% | −2.4 | ||
Informal votes | 8,370 | Informal | 3.8% | +1.1 | ||
Summary of votes by party | ||||||
Party | Primary votes | % | Swing | Seats | Change | |
Labor | 79,126 | 37.4 | −9.4 | 7 | −2 | |
Liberal | 66,855 | 31.6 | −3.2 | 6 | –1 | |
Greens | 33,057 | 15.6 | +6.3 | 4 | +3 | |
Motorist | 10,553 | 5.0 | +5.0 | 0 | 0 | |
Community Alliance | 7,730 | 3.7 | +3.7 | 0 | 0 | |
Independent | 6,961 | 3.3 | +1.5 | 0 | 0 | |
Pangallo Independents | 4,252 | 2.0 | +2.0 | 0 | 0 | |
Mulcahy Canberra Party | 2,341 | 1.1 | +1.1 | 0 | 0 | |
Liberal Democrats | 774 | 0.4 | −0.9 | 0 | 0 | |
Total | 211,649 | 17 | ||||
At the close of counting on election night 18 October 2008, with 82.1 per cent of the vote counted Labor had obtained 37.6 per cent of the vote across the ACT, with the Liberals at 31.1 per cent and the Greens at 15.8 per cent. Swings were recorded against both the Labor (-9.3 per cent) and Liberal (-3.7 per cent) parties with a +6.6 per cent swing towards the Greens. Labor won 7 seats, the Liberals won 6 seats, while the Greens won 4 seats, giving them the balance of power, and negotiated with both major parties for the formation of a minority government. [4] [21] After almost two weeks of deliberations, the Greens chose to form a minority government with Labor. [5] The ACT Electoral Commission determined and announced the election's final results on 25 October 2008 after distribution of preferences. [22]
In Brindabella, Labor lost one of its three seats to Greens candidate Amanda Bresnan. Government minister John Hargreaves was re-elected, but Labor backbencher Mick Gentleman was beaten by another Labor candidate, Joy Burch. For the Liberal Party, former leader Brendan Smyth was re-elected, but shadow minister Steve Pratt lost his seat to party colleague Steve Doszpot. [22]
Labor also lost a seat in Ginninderra, where Greens candidate Meredith Hunter was elected. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope and Labor MLA Mary Porter were both re-elected, and on the Liberal ticket sitting MLA Vicki Dunne was joined by Alistair Coe, who replaced retiring Bill Stefaniak. [22]
In seven-member Molonglo, the Liberals lost one seat to the Greens. Labor ministers Katy Gallagher, Andrew Barr and Simon Corbell all won re-election, as did Liberal leader Zed Seselja. Sitting MLA Jacqui Burke lost to Jeremy Hanson for the second Liberal seat. The Greens increased their representation in this seat to two, electing new MLAs Shane Rattenbury and Caroline Le Couteur, the latter at the expense of Liberal-turned-Independent MLA Richard Mulcahy. [22]
Electorate | Seats held | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Brindabella | |||||||
Ginninderra | |||||||
Molonglo | |||||||
Gary John Joseph Humphries is a Deputy President of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. He was a member of the Australian Senate representing the Australian Capital Territory for the Liberal Party of Australia from 2003 to 2013. He was the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory from 2000 to 2001; and was elected to the first parliament of the Australian Capital Territory, in 1989, later representing the Molonglo electorate until 2003.
This is a list of members of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, as elected at 16 October 2004 election.
Katherine Ruth Gallagher is a former Australian politician, a former member of the Australian Senate, and the former Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory and member of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly from 2001 to 2014, representing the electorate of Molonglo for the Labor Party. She was also Minister for Health, Minister for Higher Education and Minister for Regional Development.
Kerrie Robyn Tucker, former Australian politician, environmental and human rights activist, was a member of the unicameral Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly representing the multi-member electorate of Molonglo for the ACT Greens between 1995 and 2001. Tucker was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Australian Senate representing the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) for the Australian Greens at the 1993, 2004, and 2007 federal elections.
Andrew James Barr is an Australian politician and Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory. He has been a Labor Party member for the seat of Molonglo in the ACT Legislative Assembly since 5 April 2006, after being elected on a countback to replace former Treasurer Ted Quinlan, who resigned mid-term. Barr was immediately promoted to Cabinet upon his election. As one of only five Ministers in the Territory government, he held a number of portfolios: Treasurer, Economic Development, Community Services, Tourism, Sport and Recreation, and Tourism and Events. On 11 December 2014 he was elected as Chief Minister after his predecessor, Katy Gallagher, resigned and announced her intention to run for the Senate.
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly were held on Saturday, 18 February 1995. The incumbent Labor Party, led by Rosemary Follett, was challenged by the Liberal Party, led by Kate Carnell. For the first time, candidates were elected to fill three multi-member electorates using a single transferable vote method, known as the Hare-Clark system. The result was another hung parliament. However the Liberals, with the largest representation in the 17-member unicameral Assembly, formed Government with the support of Michael Moore and Paul Osborne. Carnell was elected Chief Minister at the first sitting of the third Assembly on 9 March 1995.
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly were held on Saturday, 21 February 1998. The incumbent Liberal Party, led by Kate Carnell, was challenged by the Labor Party, led by Wayne Berry. Candidates were elected to fill three multi-member electorates using a single transferable vote method, known as the Hare-Clark system. The result was another hung parliament. However the Liberals, with the largest representation in the 17-member unicameral Assembly, formed Government with the support of Michael Moore, Paul Osborne, and Dave Rugendyke. Carnell was elected Chief Minister at the first sitting of the fourth Assembly on 19 March 1998.
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly were held on Saturday, 20 October 2001. The incumbent Liberal Party, led by Gary Humphries, was challenged by the Labor Party, led by Jon Stanhope. Candidates were elected to fill three multi-member electorates using a single transferable vote method, known as the Hare-Clark system. The result was another hung parliament. However Labor, with the largest representation in the 17-member unicameral Assembly, formed Government with the support of the ACT Greens and Democrats. Stanhope was elected Chief Minister at the first sitting of the fifth Assembly on 12 November 2001. The election was conducted by the ACT Electoral Commission and was the first time in Australia's history that an electronic voting and counting system was used for some, but not all, polling places.
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly were held on Saturday, 16 October 2004. The incumbent Labor Party, led by Jon Stanhope, was challenged by the Liberal Party, led by Brendan Smyth. Candidates were elected to fill three multi-member electorates using a single transferable vote method, known as the Hare-Clark system. The result was a clear majority of nine seats in the 17-member unicameral Assembly for Labor. It marked the first and so far only time in the history of ACT self-government that one party was able to win a majority in its own right. Stanhope was elected Chief Minister at the first sitting of the sixth Assembly on 4 November 2004. The election was conducted by the ACT Electoral Commission and was the second time in Australia's history that an electronic voting and counting system was used for some, but not all, polling places, expanding on the initial trial of the system at the 2001 ACT election.
The Molonglo electorate was one of the three electorates for the unicameral 17-member Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly between 1995 and 2016. It had seven seats, and was the largest of the three electorates in terms of population.
Shane Stephen Rattenbury, Australian politician and former Speaker of the ACT Legislative Assembly, is a member of the multi-member unicameral Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly representing the electorate of Molonglo for the ACT Greens since 2008. He was the first Speaker in any Parliament in the world representing a Green political party.
Amanda Bresnan is an Australian politician and a member of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly. Bresnan was elected to the ACT Legislative Assembly representing the electorate of Brindabella for the ACT Greens at the 2008 election and defeated at the 2012 election
Meredith Hunter, Australian politician, is a former member of the multi-member unicameral Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly representing the electorate of Ginninderra for the ACT Greens from 2008 to 2012. She was also the Parliamentary Convenor of the ACT Greens.
Caroline Le Couteur is an Australian politician. She was elected to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly representing the electorate of Molonglo for the ACT Greens at the 2008 election and defeated at the 2012 election In October 2016, she was re-elected to the assembly representing the new electorate of Murrumbidgee.
Elections to the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly occurred on Saturday, 20 October 2012. The 11-year incumbent Labor Party, led by Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, won a fourth term over the main opposition Liberal Party, led by opposition leader Zed Seselja.
A general election for the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly was held on Saturday, 15 October 2016.
This is a list of members of the eighth Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, as elected at and subsequent to the October 2012 election.