Rattenbury went straight to the speakership in 2008 then was a minister 2012-24. Only in the ACT can a Greens MP do four and a bit terms with only the bit on the crossbench.

This one about compulsory voting came out a bit too late for most of the 100 years of work. But for an Australian bluesky audience it also has doorknocking. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I may have given that a try, and it does not bode well for any government relying on chat gpt to scold people into buying war bonds instead of nylons

Australia has weathered fuel crises before. What can we learn from previous oil price spikes? After the second world war, cheap oil was a foundation of global economic stability. That changed dramatically in 1973

The latest instalment of Past/Present: David Lee takes a look at how Australia has weathered fuel crises in the past, and ponders what we can learn from these experiences. Crucial reading!! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A grinning squander bug surrounded by the words 'meet the squander bug.'

This is the week when I tell students about WWII rationing and the squander bug. Who is public domain, just if any governments are thinking about that sort of thing...

This whole thread is why you can safely discount anyone who makes no politics in local government sound untried. We know exactly what it looks like in practice.

@benraue.com, @anthonyzougras.bsky.social, and @joshsunman.bsky.social are doing great job with a very messy election.

Urbans laundering their grievances against other urbans via the bush is a great Australian tradition

What actually happened is nobody touched it again until the early 80s, when the bigger electorates were getting toward 90,000 voters.

Calwell: 'One can never tell what will happen in the future, but my surmise is as good as that of any one else and I am satisfied that, with a birth rate of 23 per 1,000 women of childbearing age and our system of planned immigration, it is possible that by 1960 Australia will hold between 9,500.000 and 10,000,000 people and that the numbers in each electorate will have increased from about 40,000, as we propose to have them now, to about 53,000, and there will be occasion then, if not earlier, for a further increase of the size of the Parliament.'

Just adding to the parliamentary expansion good but go big while you can takes. Here's Arthur Calwell in 1948 being wildly optimistic about how often you get to expand parliament:

Lots of candidates at early 70s elections letterboxed metricisation tables instead of the usual calendars etc. I wonder how many other orgs effectively supplemented the campaign for their own marketing

I had forgotten about the whole Kikkert drama, but that explains Belco doing significantly better on Liberal preferences than FF

Election data confirms what we already know: Greens don't like Liberals Greens voters overwhelmingly preference Labor over the Liberal Party across the country — and a look at the data from the 2024 ACT election suggests there's no reason to think that would be different ...

Nice analysis by @caseybriggs.com on ACT election preference flows. #actpol

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

The Liberal preferences are also interesting. Liberal voters clearly (and correctly) saw the Belco Party as more like-minded than I4C.

The unspoken rule of Liberal-National contests is not enough to produce a trend. The federal Coalition has always been able to tolerate a few, but not enough to say one party is winning.

This article is very old but still a good overview of anti-partism in the 20s and 30s. I go back to it fairly often for a what's changed and what hasn't: www.jstor.org/stable/27507...

A few decades in an archive box will turn sellotape into razor blades. I now bring bandaids when I'm doing mid 20th century stuff

Ben's doing some fascinating work on parliament expansion and this one makes a key point. The 1948 expansion was a big moment for the urbanisation of Australian politics, but that's done. Now it's a way to get more compact country seats without malapportionment.

McMillan 1972 is the usual answer. Country Party candidate won after coming fourth on a primary of <20%. But I'm not sure if that's all Australian elections or just federal

Alfred Deakin liked your post

Shrinkflation has hit the caramel slice hard since then, but the building is still the best in Canberra

The Dismissal from below • Frank Bongiorno (with James Watson) Fifty years later, what impact has the Dismissal had on Australian democracy?

My keynote, from the just-finished Labour History conference 'The Spirit of 1975' at Melbourne Trades Hall, part of the Congress of HASS. The Dismissal from below, on Inside Story inside.org.au/the-dismissa...

The Rookwood mortuary station is now a church in Canberra. Which Canberra is kind of sleeping on

We covered a lot in this one. Population movements, country v city, marginal seat campaigns, and the extremely cooked old Senate system.

The very weird answer to this is Shane Rattenbury in 2012. It's did not recontest rather than resigned, but I'm sure Zed would have given it to him for confidence and supply.

Also the existence of the ACT government, although there's a generation of progressives who agreed with him on that one

This guy was One Nation in spirit, but the nineties in Canberra were a cooked time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_...

The 1948 expansion – the big map change The first expansion of parliament was passed in 1948, and came into force at the 1949 election. It was also the largest increase we’ve seen, either proportionally or in raw numbers. The House…

Today's blog post looks at the first time the federal parliament was expanded in 1948 - how the pendulum looked before and after the change, and where the marginal seats were located #auspol www.tallyroom.com.au/63613

Labor ran a Long in the same seat in 2020. I'm sure you can imagine how it went