Electorates in Australia are geographically defined areas represented by a single elected Member of Parliament. Known officially as divisions at the federal level and electoral districts at the state and territory level, "electorates" are also commonly referred to as seats or constituencies . Electorates are designed so that there is approximately the same amount of voters in electorate. [1]
The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the upper house being the Senate. Its composition and powers are established in Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia.
The Australian electoral system comprises the laws and processes used for the election of members of the Australian Parliament and is governed primarily by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The system presently has a number of distinctive features including compulsory enrolment, compulsory voting, majority-preferential instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the House of Representatives, and the use of the single transferable vote proportional representation system to elect the upper house, the Senate.
Electoral systems for the legislatures of the individual Australian states and territories are broadly similar to the electoral system used in federal elections in Australia.
The Victorian Legislative Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Victoria in Australia; the upper house being the Victorian Legislative Council. Both houses sit at Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne.
The House of Assembly, or Lower House, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of Tasmania in Australia. The other is the Legislative Council or Upper House. It sits in Parliament House in the state capital, Hobart.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is the independent federal agency in charge of organising, conducting and supervising federal Australian elections, by-elections and referendums.
Elections in Australia take place periodically to elect the legislature of the Commonwealth of Australia, as well as for each Australian state and territory and for local government councils. Elections in all jurisdictions follow similar principles, although there are minor variations between them. The elections for the Australian Parliament are held under the federal electoral system, which is uniform throughout the country, and the elections for state and territory Parliaments are held under the electoral system of each state and territory.
In Australia, electoral districts for the Australian House of Representatives are called divisions or more commonly referred to as electorates or seats. There are currently 151 single-member electorates for the Australian House of Representatives.
In Australia, one vote, one value is a democratic principle, applied in electoral laws governing redistributions of electoral divisions of the House of Representatives. The principle calls for all electoral divisions to have the same number of enrolled voters, within a specified percentage of variance. The electoral laws of the Commonwealth for the House of Representatives and all states follow the principle with some exceptions. The principle does not apply to the Senate, as each state is entitled under the constitution to the same number of senators irrespective of the population of the state.
The Western Australian Legislative Council is the upper house of the Parliament of Western Australia, a state of Australia. It is regarded as a house of review for legislation passed by the Legislative Assembly, the lower house. The two Houses of Parliament sit in Parliament House in the state capital, Perth.
The Legislative Assembly of Queensland is the sole chamber of the unicameral Parliament of Queensland established under the Constitution of Queensland. Elections are held every four years and are done by full preferential voting. The Assembly has 93 members, who have used the letters MP after their names since 2000.
The electoral division of Lyons is one of the five electorates in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, it is the largest electorate covering most of central and eastern Tasmania. Lyons is named jointly in honor of Joseph Lyons, Prime Minister of Australia (1932–1939); Premier of Tasmania (1923–1928), and Joseph's wife, Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1943. The electorate shares its name and boundaries with the federal division of Lyons.
The politics of Australia take place within the framework of a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Australia has maintained a stable liberal democratic political system under its Constitution, one of the world's oldest, since Federation in 1901. Australia is the world's sixth oldest continuous democracy and largely operates as a two-party system in which voting is compulsory. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Australia a "full democracy" in 2021. Australia is also a federation, where power is divided between the federal government and the states and territories.
In Australia, a redistribution is the process of redrawing the boundaries of electoral divisions for the House of Representatives arising from changes in population and changes in the number of representatives. There is no redistribution for the Senate as each State constitutes a division, though with multiple members. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), an independent statutory authority, oversees the apportionment and redistribution process for federal divisions, taking into account a number of factors. Politicians, political parties and the public may make submissions to the AEC on proposed new boundaries, but any interference with their deliberations is considered a serious offence.
Mundingburra is an electoral district of the Legislative Assembly in the Australian state of Queensland. It is currently held by Labor Party MP Les Walker.
A State Electoral District is an electorate within the Lower House or Legislative Assembly of Australian states and territories. Most state electoral districts send a single member to a state or territory's parliament using the preferential method of voting. The area of a state electoral district is dependent upon the Electoral Acts in the various states and vary in area between them. At present, there are 409 state electoral districts in Australia.
The 1909 Tasmanian state election was held on Friday, 30 April 1909 in the Australian state of Tasmania to elect 30 members of the Tasmanian House of Assembly. At the 1909 election there was a reduction in the number of members from 35 to 30 and the first statewide use of the Hare-Clark proportional representation system — six members were elected from each of five electorates. The election saw an increase in Labour seats from 7 to 12, at the expense of the Anti-Socialist Party.
Western Australia politics takes place in context of a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliamentary system, and like other Australian states, Western Australia is part of the federation known as the Commonwealth of Australia.
The electoral division of Clark is one of the five electorates in the Tasmanian House of Assembly, it is located in Hobart on the western shore of the River Derwent and includes the suburbs below Mount Wellington. Clark is named after Andrew Inglis Clark, a Tasmanian jurist who was the principal author of the Australian Constitution. The electorate shares its name and boundaries with the federal division of Clark.
The 2025 Western Australian state election is scheduled to be held on 8 March 2025 to elect members to the Parliament of Western Australia, where all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 37 seats in the Legislative Council will be up for election.