Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 1)

[El Derpo]

We do 50% of the senate each election and terms are set at 6 years. We adapted our system from yours.

One of the rare elected Commonwealth upper houses too, most copied the House of Lords, there wouldn't have been many elected upper houses to copy at the time. IIRC, Australia's the only country with double dissolutions! None of the other elected half-upper-houses have that.

Our system is pretty good all things said. We did the typical Australian thing of looking at what everyone else was doing, borrowed most of it and made it slightly better while also introducing a bunch of our own dumb stuff which is now really difficult to change.

It didn't hurt that we tried a bunch of stuff at the state level before Federation. Which is ironic, because the state/federal divide is probably the biggest issue we have with inconsistencies between states on things like health, industrial relations, education, energy and more being big sticking points.

That being said, it would be pretty difficult to find many Australians that are dissatisfied with their level of representation, manic conspiracy gronks aside.

We have stable government, good checks and balances on power and excellent oversight resulting in low levels of corruption.

I think we benefit from a lot of federal/state government powers being distributed to pretty well run bureaucracies which maintain continuity between governments. The jobs also pay well so they’re able to retain staff and the incentive for corruption is reduced.

It also helps that the PM serves at the pleasure of the house of reps, so they really can’t do anything too dictatorial.