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Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties - virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party 'two-horse race', television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a 'presidential'-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores a systematic investigation of parliamentary discourse over the `sports rorts' affair in the Australian parliament in 1993 and 1994. Ethical diversity in the invisible parliamentary culture; Role of parties; Constructing narratives of ethical legislative behavior; Ethical meaning of the community grants narratives; Conclusion.

The UK and Australian literature on free vote patterns highlights that, even under 'unwhipped' free vote circumstances, party membership remains the key predictor of MPs' voting patterns. However, analyses of free votes have focused on single parliaments and as such, it is not clear whether the insights of this literature can be generalised. This article analyses MPs'voting behaviour, during free voting on landmark legislation, which sought to allow equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The article will address the following questions: Which MPs supported proposals to legalise same-sex marriage? What were the main factors that predicted their voting? Why were the majority of MPs in the UK and New Zealand, but not Australia, willing to support law reform? Whilst voting in the UK and New Zealand followed a strikingly similar pattern, there are key differences in the voting in Australia. This is attributed to two main factors: first, the 'whipping' of small T liberal Coalition MPs in the Australian House of Representatives who might have otherwise voted in favour of reform; and, secondly, the different pathways along which the 'centre-left' political parties have evolved in New Zealand and Australia, which led to a larger presence of Catholics in the Australian Labor Party than in either the UK or NZ Labour Parties. It is possible to conclude from the analysis more broadly, that although party remains the best predictor of voting patterns across the three Westminster democracies recently, gender has also emerged as an important predictor of voting patterns. This finding is discussed in the final part of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1932 the Lyons UAP government suspended the operations of the Commonwealth parliament's public accounts committee, allegedly as an economy measure. The role of public accounts committees is, in principle, that of a non-partisan reviewer of the public finances, but in this case the committee had diverged from its charter and become involved in politics and policy. Twenty years later, the Menzies government resurrected the committee. A crucial figure in its re-establishment was F.A. Bland, variously a professor of public administration, member for Warringah in the House of Representatives, and a significant public intellectual from the 1920s to the 1960s. Today Bland is almost forgotten but the role the re-established committee played in its early days was largely a reflection of his interests and commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processes political parties use to select their candidates for public office constitute a crucial element of political recruitment in representative democracies and provide important insights into how power is distributed within party organisations. In this article, we develop a typology for understanding the diversity of preselection mechanisms in Australia's major parties that is based on degrees of influence between the central and local components of the party organisation. The typology in turn reflects preselection rules as public expressions of intra-party power sharing arrangements. We also identify the institutional, strategic and normative factors (including electoral systems, the accommodation of intra-party groups, candidate quality, efficiency and social norms) that influence the choices parties have to make when selecting and implementing a particular system. 政党用以选举候选人出任公职的过程构成了代议制民主国家政治遴选的一个关键因素，并提供了理解政党组织内权力分配的一个重要角度。本文根据中央和地方党组织之间影响的不同程度，提出了一种分类法以理解澳大利亚主要政党预选机制的多样性。这种分类法本身反映了作为表达政党内权力分享安排的预选规则。我们还找到了体制、战略以及规范性因素（包括选举制度、党内不同群体的相互适应、候选人品质、效率、社会规范等等），这些因素会影响政党选择和实施某种制度时的决策。 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Are the Australian Greens, as a political organisation, experiencing a similar transformation to green parties in Europe in moving from a movement-based party to a pragmatic parliamentary party? What are the implications of changes in the party organisation, and how key party activists respond to this? The debate surrounding party leadership, and particularly parliamentary leadership, is a central issue. As the Greens have increased their parliamentary representation, the question of access to resources, as much as access to media, has brought the leadership issue to the forefront. The resignation of Senator Bob Brown as federal leader on 13 April 2012 has sharpened that focus. This article explores the role of the ‘party organisational activist’ and, in particular, how party activists perceive and respond to issues of leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article shows the new party groupings and alignments that came about after the 2010 Australian parliamentary elections. It examines how the three-cornered political geometry of the Liberal, Labor and Green Parties will translate to future governmental policies and initiatives. It looks at how the 2010 elections changed some of the prevailing political trends that defined Australian politics at this time, among them the continuing impact of climate change initiatives and the gradual shift from conservative to liberal views.