This paper by Dr John Uhr (prepared for a conference on 'Constitutional and Parliamentary Reform for South Australia') advocates ten measures for reform, which cover the three activities that are central to an effective Parliament: representation, legislation and accountability. The aim is to identify opportunities for an independent Parliament to exercise greater self-regulation and to...

In the Australian political party system Members of Parliament are sometimes given the opportunity to exercise a "conscience vote" on moral and social issues such as abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. \The decision of the major parties to allow members a free vote on the Research Involving Embryos and Prohibition of Cloning Bill 2002 has...

The purpose of this paper is to comment upon the relationship between MPs and copyright law and to analyse the impact of the law of parliamentary privilege upon it. That relationship can be approached from at least three perspectives which can be categorised as the 'governmental', 'parliamentary' and 'private'.

This paper reviews the near-century of Parliamentary development of the Commonwealth electoral system: the 'rules for representation' devised by Parliament regulating the requirements of representation for the Senate and House of Representatives and the electoral process more generally. One of the few constants in this story is the frequency of change, as successive Parliaments have...

Outside of the requirement for free, regular, unavoidable, non-corrupt, competitive elections, there is no standard set of rules for defining a democracy. As a result, care needs to be taken not to generalise. This research paper attempts to judge certain aspects of Australia's parliamentary democracy in their own terms. In particular it looks at the...