Australia’s first job-sharing electoral candidates will contest the 2025 Senate election.
Lucy Bradlow and Bronwen Bock, best friends from Victoria, had intended to run for the seat of Higgins in the 2025 Australian election. With Higgins’ abolition, the duo intend to run for the Senate, where they will share a seat.
However, this approach is unconstitutional. The Senate isn’t made up of ‘seats,’ it is made up of ‘Senators.’
Section 7 of the Australian Constitution is the authoritative source on the structure of the Australian Senate. According to that section, “the Senate shall be composed of senators for each State … as one electorate.”
Each State is given an equal number of senators, originally six but now increased to twelve. Rather than representing individuals, which is what the House of Representatives does through its electorates, the Senate represents the State as a whole.
This is borrowed from the United States of America, although it only grants each state two senators.
At the 1897 Sydney session of the Constitutional Convention, New South Wales had raised the idea of using proportional representation by populaton in the Senate, and that proposal was almost unanimously rejected. Only five representatives at the Convention backed it.
As mentioned earlier, the key term here is ‘senator.’ It is an individual title, so can only reasonably be held by a single person. That is the purpose of this section: Each state is granted twelve individual senators.
The focus is on “equal representation.” It is a concession to the less populous states, whereas having electorates based on population benefits the more populous states, which is done through the House of Representatives.
If the saying that ‘two brains are better than one’ is true, then even though a job-sharing arrangement might only count as one vote, it would still give Victoria an extra ‘brain’ in the Senate.
That doesn’t mean that section 7 doesn’t have any, to use the legal term, ‘wiggle room.’
At face value, it limits the Senate to the states. However, section 122 grants the Commonwealth government to “allow the representation of such territory in either House of Parliament to the extent and on the terms which it fits.”
In the First Territory Senators’ Case (1975), by a narrow 4:3 split, a majority of the High Court ruled that section 7 must be read in the context of section 122. Led by the fervent opinions of Justices Mason and Murphy, the majority reasoned that it was unlikely that the territories would be denied representation forever.
But even then, Justice Mason concluded that this was the only possible concession to the “overwhelming force” of section 7.
The subordinate role played by the territories in the Australian federal system has meant that judges are reluctant to give the territories more senators, in the unlikely event that Parliament passes legislation to.
If giving territories two senators is the extent of the ‘wiggle room’ of section 7, then reinterpreting the word ‘senator’ to mean ‘two or more people sharing one title’ is out of the question.
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