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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 Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia. There are a total of 76 senators: 12 are elected from each of the six Australian states regardless of population and 2 from each of the two autonomous internal Australian territories. Senators are popularly elected under the single transferable vote system of proportional representation.
A quorum is the minimum number of members of a deliberative assembly necessary to conduct the business of that group. According to Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, the "requirement for a quorum is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons." In contrast, a plenum is a meeting of the full body.
A constitutional amendment is a modification of the constitution of a polity, organization or other type of entity. Amendments are often interwoven into the relevant sections of an existing constitution, directly altering the text. Conversely, they can be appended to the constitution as supplemental additions, thus changing the frame of government without altering the existing text of the document.
The Parliament of Australia is the legislative branch of the government of Australia. It consists of three elements: the Crown, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The combination of two elected chambers, in which the members of the Senate represent the states and territories while the members of the House represent electoral divisions according to population, is modelled on the United States Congress. Through both chambers, however, there is a fused executive, drawn from the Westminster system.
The President of the Senate is the presiding officer of the Australian Senate, the upper house of the Parliament of Australia.
In the Parliament of Australia, a casual vacancy arises when a member of either the Senate or the House of Representatives:
The Constitution Act, 1867 is a major part of the Constitution of Canada. The Act created a federal dominion and defines much of the operation of the Government of Canada, including its federal structure, the House of Commons, the Senate, the justice system, and the taxation system. The British North America Acts, including this Act, were renamed in 1982 with the patriation of the Constitution ; however, it is still known by its original name in United Kingdom records. Amendments were also made at this time: section 92A was added, giving provinces greater control over non-renewable natural resources.
In Australia's political system, the Federal Executive Council is a body established by Section 62 of the Australian Constitution to advise the Governor-General, and comprises, at least notionally, all current and former Commonwealth Ministers and Assistant Ministers. As the Governor-General is bound by convention to follow the advice of the Executive Council on almost all occasions, the Executive Council has de jure executive power. This power is used to legally enact the decisions of the Cabinet, which under conventions of the Westminster system has no de jure authority. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the Cabinet.
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government is made up of three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States.
The Constitution of Barbados is the supreme law under which Barbados is governed. The Constitution provides a legal establishment of the structure and various roles of administration of the Queen of Barbados, the Government of Barbados, as well as legal rights and responsibilities of the public and various other government officers. The Constitution which came into force in 1966 was amended in 1974, 1978, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2002, and 2003. The 1966 document succeeds several other documents concerning administration of Barbados. One of them, the Barbados Charter, is discussed in the present Constitution's Preamble. Prior statutes were created for the administration of Barbados as a colony. As a former English and later British colony, the Constitution is similar to those of other Commonwealth realms, yet distinctly different in the spirit of the Statute of Westminster. In recent years there has been some dialogue on whether Barbados should undertake a process of patriating the constitution to cease the foundation being a 1966 Act of the British House of Commons.
Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia establishes the Parliament of Australia and its role as the legislative branch of the Government of Australia. The chapter consists of 60 sections which are organised into 5 parts.
Section 13 of the Constitution of Australia provides for three aspects of the terms of members of the Australian Senate: the timing of elections, the commencement date of their terms and for the Senate to allocate long (six-year) and short (three-year) terms following a double dissolution of the Parliament of Australia. While members of the House of Representatives and territory senators have a maximum three-year term, state senators have a fixed six-year term, subject only to the parliament being dissolved by a double dissolution.
Section 24 of the Constitution of Australia is titled "Constitution of House of Representatives". It provides that the House of Representatives be "directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth" and have twice as many seats as the Senate. It also provides a formula for the number of seats in each state, subject to later amendment by the parliament, and guarantees at least five members for each original state.
Section 39 of the Constitution of Australia provides that the quorum of the Australian House of Representatives shall be one third of the total number of members, until the Parliament otherwise provides.
Section 46 of the Constitution of Australia provides a penalty for a Senator or member of the House of Representatives who sits while constitutionally ineligible or disqualified from holding that position.
The Constitution Act, 1886 (UK), 58 & 59 Vict, c 35, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and forms part of the Constitution of Canada. It was originally known as the British North America Act, 1886, but it was renamed by the Constitution Act, 1982.
Western Australia v Commonwealth, also known as the First Territory Senators' Case, was an important decision of the High Court of Australia concerning the procedure in section 57 of the Constitution and the representation of territories in the Senate. The Court unanimously held that legislation providing for the representation of the Northern Territory and the Australia Capital Territory in the Senate had been passed in accordance with section 57 of the Constitution and, by majority, that the representation of the territories was constitutionally valid.
The next Australian federal election will be held on or before 21 May 2022 to elect members of the 47th Parliament of Australia.
References
- ↑ Senate (Quorum) Act 1991 (Cth)
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