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Chapter 1 - The
Senate and its constitutional role
The Parliament of the Commonwealth of
Australia, which is given the power to make laws for the Commonwealth by the
Constitution, has two elected houses: the Senate and the House of
Representatives.
There are two reasons for this division of the law-making body, the
legislature, into two houses. Both reasons have a long history, pre-dating the
framing of the Australian Constitution by elected conventions in the 1890s.
The first is expressed by the term bicameralism, the principle that
making and changing the laws should require the consent of two different
bodies. The requirement for the consent of two differently constituted
assemblies is a quality control on the making of laws. It is also a safeguard
against misuse of the law-making power, and, in particular, against the control
of one body by a political faction not properly representative of the whole
community.
Secondly, the division of the legislature into two houses allows the
central legislature of the nation to reflect and secure its federal nature,
that is, that it is a union of states, in which the responsibilities of
government are divided between regional state legislatures representing the
people of their regions and exercising regional powers, and a national
legislature, representing the people of the whole country, exercising specified
national powers. In such a nation, particularly a nation occupying a large
geographical area, a central legislature elected by the people as a whole
necessarily involves the danger that a majority within that legislature could
be formed by the representatives of only one or two regions, leading to neglect
of the interests of other regions and their consequent alienation from the
central government. The solution to this problem is to have one house of the
legislature elected by the people as a whole, representing regions in
proportion to their population, and one house elected by the people voting in
their separate regions, and representing those regions equally. This federal
bicameral structure was invented by the framers of the Constitution of the United States of
America
in 1787, has been followed by federal states around the globe, and was followed
by the framers of the Australian Constitution.
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