The Australian Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives.
The electoral system of Australia 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.
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. An election day is always a Saturday, but early voting is allowed in the lead-up to it.
The Family First Party was a conservative political party in Australia which existed from 2002 to 2017. It was founded in South Australia where it enjoyed its greatest electoral support. Since the demise of the Australian Conservatives into which it merged, it has been refounded in that state as the Family First Party (2021), where it contested the state election in 2022, but failed to win a seat.
The Division of Higgins is an Australian Electoral Division in Victoria for the Australian House of Representatives. The division covers 41 km2 (16 sq mi) in Melbourne's inner south-eastern suburbs. The main suburbs include Armadale, Ashburton, Carnegie, Glen Iris, Kooyong, Malvern, Malvern East, Murrumbeena, Prahran and Toorak; along with parts of Camberwell, Ormond and South Yarra. Though historically a safe conservative seat, Higgins was won by the Liberal Party by a margin of just 3.9 percent over the Labor Party at the 2019 election, the closest result in the seat’s history. It then flipped to Labor in the 2022 election.
The Division of Cunningham is an Australian electoral division in the state of New South Wales.
The Division of Griffith is an electoral division for the Australian House of Representatives. The division covers the inner southern suburbs of Brisbane, Queensland.
The Division of Bonner is an Australian Electoral Division in Queensland, located in the eastern suburbs of Brisbane, including the suburbs of Chandler, Carindale, Manly, Mansfield, Mount Gravatt, Wishart and Wynnum.
The Division of Moreton is an Australian Electoral Division in Queensland.
The Division of Rankin is an Australian Electoral Division in Queensland.
The Division of Ryan is an Australian Electoral Division in Queensland.
The Greens (WA) is a member party of the Australian Greens in Western Australia. The Greens (WA) was formed following the merger of the Western Australian Green Party with the Green Earth Alliance composed of the Vallentine Peace Group and Alternative Coalition in 1990. The Party became officially affiliated with the Australian Greens in 2003.
Legalise Cannabis Australia (LCA), also known as the Legalise Cannabis Party (LCP) and formerly the Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party, is a registered single-issue Australian political party. It has a number of policies that centre around the re-legalisation and regulation of cannabis for personal, medicinal and industrial uses in Australia.
The Queensland Greens is a Green party in Queensland, Australia, and a state member of the Australian Greens. The party is currently represented in all three levels of government, by Larissa Waters and Penny Allman-Payne in the federal Senate; Stephen Bates, Max Chandler-Mather, and Elizabeth Watson-Brown in the House of Representatives; Michael Berkman and Amy MacMahon in the state Legislative Assembly; and Trina Massey and Seal Chong Wah in Brisbane City Council.
The Climate Change Coalition (CCC), briefly known as 4Change, was an Australian political party, which was formed in 2007 with a view to accelerate action by politicians from all parties on global warming and climate change. Its position on working towards addressing climate change stressed cooperation with big business in order to achieve significant progress on the issue. The party therefore advocated a close working relationship between environmentalists and the business community. The CCC was registered as a political party with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on 4 September 2007 and deregistered on 25 March 2010.
The Sustainable Australia Party (SAP), officially registered as Sustainable Australia Party – Universal Basic Income, is an Australian political party that was formed in 2010.
The United Australia Party (UAP), formerly known as Clive Palmer's United Australia Party and the Palmer United Party (PUP), is an Australian political party formed by mining magnate Clive Palmer in April 2013. The party was deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission in 2017, revived and re-registered in 2018, and voluntarily deregistered in 2022. The party fielded candidates in all 150 House of Representatives seats at the 2013 federal election. Palmer, the party's leader, was elected to the Division of Fairfax and it reached a peak of three senators following the rerun of the Western Australian senate election in 2014. When the party was revived under its original name in 2018, it was represented by ex-One Nation senator Brian Burston in the federal parliament.
The 2019 Australian federal election was held on Saturday 18 May 2019 to elect members of the 46th Parliament of Australia. The election had been called following the dissolution of the 45th Parliament as elected at the 2016 double dissolution federal election. All 151 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate were up for election.
The Australian Sex Party was an Australian political party founded in 2009 in response to concerns over the purported increasing influence of religion in Australian politics. The party was born out of an adult-industry lobby group, the Eros Association. Its leader, Fiona Patten, was formerly the association's CEO.
The next Australian federal election will be held on or before 27 September 2025 to elect members of the 48th Parliament of Australia. All 151 seats in the House of Representatives and likely 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate will be contested. It is expected that at this election, the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be seeking re-election to a second term in office, opposed by the Liberal/National Coalition under Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton.
