I have noticed that all election boxes in Results of the 2019 Australian federal election in Victoria had been previously marked as "hold", which is not exactly true for a number of seats (e.g. Dunkley, Corangamite etc.). I have some issues which this:
Dunkley and Corangamite were notionally Labor before the election, but I personally would not consider it as "hold" as it was held by Liberal prior to the election
Would Chisholm be "Liberal gain from Independent" or "Liberal hold"
Would Indi be "Independent gain from Independent", or "Independent hold"
What I understand to be the current consensus is comparing the position from the previous election. Where the seat changed as a result of a by-election or the member left their previous party, that is usually addressed with a note. In relation to the specific examples:
Dunkley and Corangamite should be "Labor gain from Liberal" but with the note As a result of the 2018 boundary redistribution, the Liberal-held seats of Corangamite and Dunkley became notionally marginal Labor seats.
Chisholm should be "Liberal hold", but should have a note that Julia Banks was elected as the Liberal member for Chisholm in 2016, but resigned from the party in November 2018 and sat as an independent. She unsuccessfully contested Flinders as an independent
Indi should be "Independent gain from Independent" - independent refers to them as an individual, not merely as endorsed by the unregistered interest group Voices for Indi. As with the others there should be a note that Sitting member Cathy McGowan (independent) did not contest the election and endorsed the candidacy of Helen Haines (independent). I am concerned that the Indi results show a swing away from Haines when she wasn't a candidate previously - its not a sourcing question as the swing comes from the AEC, but it is suggesting that she is not in fact independent.
As far as I recall, I think we have generally adopted the convention that when a redistribution changes the party notionally in control of a seat, we have referred to "gain"/"hold" as being from the notional result rather than the previous election. But it's a tricky one and I don't particularly care either way. The Drover's Wife (talk) 03:19, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
I did these tables, and the 'hold' was on the notional seats was intentional. That said, it isn't entirely cut-and-dried and the fact that they regularly get "corrected" or queried means that status quo is perhaps not necessarily the best course. The notional holds are included in the Seats Changing Hands table in the main election article (which the AEC also does). With the results tables, my thinking is they should reflect the geographic and demographic composition using the electoral boundaries at that election (by modelling the previous election as if run the new boundaries), so that includes the primary vote swings, the two-candidate swings and the incumbent party, and I don't think we should pick and choose to list the swings on new boundaries but not the incumbent. Similarly with by-elections, the swing modelling is also based on the previous general election, not the by-election, because by-elections are run in different circumstances and times, and major parties often don't run, so the modelling of the swings is very unsound. My preference would be to include a clarifying note as Find Bruce has done, but to keep the hold/gain as originally set from the notional hold. Note that Antony Green at the ABC uses the notional hold as well, see Corangamite - ALP Retain, Dunkley – ALP Retain, although does not list them as changing hands as AEC and Wikipedia do.
Another possibility discussed in the distant past is to add a template for "Notional [party] hold"—in fact, I added some text at Redistribution (Australia)#Notional seat status with the intention of linking it to such a template, but didn't end up adding it.
Lastly, with Indi, this was very deeply considered. Neither AEC or ABC list Indi as changing hands, and I believe the thinking at the time in multiple sources was that as McGowan had endorsed Haines as her successor, they were of the same "party" and Haines' nomination was a de facto preselection, but McGowan and Haines were both technically independent. --Canley (talk) 07:00, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for that Canley - perhaps I shouldn't have been quite so bold, but it does reinforce to me the need for a clarifying note, regardless of which way the consensus falls on hold or gain. Personally I think that the statements by Green on Dunkley "Previously held by ALP with margin of 1%" and "Peta Murphy first Labor win since 1993" are mutually exclusive, but we are meant to be following what the reliable sources say, not my opinion. It does make it hard to reconcile with the overall results table at the top of the page which shows the Liberals losing 2 seats without any seats being a gain from the Liberals. The opposite approach appears to have been taken in relation to Wentworth in NSW where the swing is calculated by reference to the 2016 election, but the gain/loss is relative to the by-election, with the nonsensical result that Wentworth is a gain for the Liberals with a 16 point swing against them. Again the overall result is difficult to reconcile with the Liberals losing 1 seat, when the seat results show them winning 2 & losing 2. --Find bruce (talk) 10:34, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
Chris Crewther (Liberal) had won the seat at the 2016 election, however as a result of the 2018 boundary redistribution, the Liberal-held seats of Corangamite and Dunkley became notionally marginal Labor seats.
I've added a "notional" field option to the hold template, if you put "notional=yes" in the template it will include the word "notional" with the link to the notional seat status section. Revert if any objections or issues, otherwise I will add it to the gain template as well and start adding the field to results pages.
Thanks Canley, I think that makes both the change and the swing calculations clear & I have boldly added it to the gain template & documentation. --Find bruce (talk) 23:19, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
Party membership numbers
There's been a slow moving edit war at United Australia Party (2013) over membership numbers. The latest shot fired involves the addition of number from a Sky News article today telling us that Clive Palmer claims to have over 60,000 members in his party. This is obviously not the best way to obtain such a number for our article.
Figures for the Liberal Party of Australia come from a claim made by the national director of the party. Those for the Australian Labor Party, via the same article, come from its national secretary.
So in each case we are using a claim from a major person within the party. Presumably this is because there are no better, independent sources. Does anyone know if that really is the case?
I personally find none of these sources acceptable. Is it really worth including a number that is so hard to be sure of? HiLo48 (talk) 03:45, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
Australia is one of the few countries that has public funding for parties, but very lax public reporting obligations for reporting internal party stats such as membership. Other than the 500/1500 required for party registration, there's no other obligations. [1] Australian political science papers etc rely on self-reported membership numbers, there's not really much reason to not trust them since they report collapses in membership too. UAP's comparatively high membership numbers, if we're trusting Clive specifically, is probably because all their public advertising points towards the membership signup form, and it costs $0 (compared to $20-100) to become a member. Normal sources for major parties are reliable, and should remain, but not sure if Palmer has a prior history of being a reliable source. Catiline52 (talk) 04:36, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I too had a look and saw that it costs nothing to become a Clive member. So again, it doesn't prove much. I'm not sure that little (a) beside the number is really enough indication of the credibility or significance of the number. HiLo48 (talk) 04:47, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
Well, we could say for any party. "At DATE, the XYZ party claimed it has MMMM members, who pay an annual membership fee of $D" and include any other requirements to be a member if applicable (give them your first born child, promise to be a vegetarian, or whatever). That way people can form their own opinion. If we wanted to, we could add that there is no external auditing of membership numbers. it's the old story -- just put the facts we have in front of the reader and let them decide what they think about the membership of any party. We can't tell them what to think but we can tell them how the system works. Kerry (talk) 12:46, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, that would be perfect within the text. The problem is with Infoboxes. There is no room or capacity there to explain such things. Many readers, myself included, will often go to an article, and obtain a fact we're after directly from an Infobox, without ever reading the text of an article. Do we ban the inclusion of such numbers in Infoboxes? HiLo48 (talk) 21:08, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
Well the usual strategy with infobox fields is to not use them if the matter is too complex to accurately represent there, so put an invisible comment in the imfobox to say "too complex to represent here, put info in article body." Kerry (talk) 02:17, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
Proposed Merge: Political groups (Australia) and Electoral system of Australia
There's been a habit in the past of treating deregistration as the point at which a party is no more; however sometimes the organisations carry on for a bit and can return to the register if they recruit enough members. Alternatively they may opt to instead operate through other bodies such as trade unions or multi party alliances and the like. The new federal requirement for a minimum of 1500 members (previously 500) is likely to push a good number of existing parties into this territory and it will be confusing to start listing them all as dissolved and then some of them as recreated. However some of the smaller ones may drop off the radar completely. How best for articles to handle this? Timrollpickering (talk) 16:17, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
When the membership requirement was extremely low (500 people out of 26 million), falling below this number was mostly a symptom of the party dying. Very few parties ended up re-registering after de-registering. However, I agree that an actually still-functioning party could potentially fail to hit the stricter 1500 limit. I'm not sure of a systematic way of dealing with this, but if there's still signs of significant activity of the party existing the page should still label it as an active party, similar to how the Communist Party of Australia (1971) (which was formerly registered) was handled. I'm not sure of cases where multi-party alliances have emerged in Australia, usually micro parties end up directly merging, but if that did occur the parties involved should be seen as still-existing too. I'm not sure whether we should include these less significant parties in the main political party page, or the political party infobox though. Catiline52 (talk) 23:27, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
I seem to recall that there is a template to generate a standard citation for APH biographies (like cite web, cite legislation etc.). Can someone remind me what the template is? Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:06, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
You're welcome. The only downside the the APH citation is that it doesn't include every former member, nor link to the Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate. I've added it and the NSW & Victorian templates to the project page. There are good intentions for the other states, but nothing done as yet. --Find bruce (talk) 03:45, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
I have created a draft article for Greg Mirabella and will move it to mainspace when he is officially appointed as Senator by Parliament of Victoria. Please feel free to expand on the draft article, particularly early life, army life and political views. Marcnut1996 (talk) 22:45, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
{{Infobox election}} converts | party= Liberal/Country coalition to Liberal. While the link is correct the text is misleading & it seems to me should show as "Liberal/Country coalition" or if that is too long, simply as Coalition. It seems to work off modules - Module:Political party/L looks like it connects to "Liberal Party of Australia", however it is beyond my ken as to how it works. Does anyone know how to correct it?--Find bruce (talk) 08:33, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
"Voices of" Groups article
In recent months I've watched with interest the growth of the "Voices of" movement. I think it is great that Wikipedia is covering this topic. The article is being edited frequently as the date for the next election draws near.
I certainly agree with your premise. Examples include sentences like these:
News Corp Australia is struggling to sustain a political narrative in which it can continue to exercise decades of political influence in Australia.
News Corp Australia also appears to be opposed to Voices groups and the Independent campaigns Voices groups have endorsed with biased news coverage, op-eds and providing op-ed space to Liberal and National party incumbents.
Senator Andrew Bragg wrote to the Australian Electoral Commission to ask them to ensure that the groups were fulfilling all the requirements for disclosures for political donations. This is despite the fact that the groups were not political parties, and at that stage had not endorsed any candidates
I must confess I am struggling to see how this is am improvement to replace what is a lengthy list with an unwieldy list of every political party that has existed in the world. Instead of having a minor problem where different templates use different colours with a much larger one where the use of common terms, such as liberal, green, labor, etc, editors may inadvertently link to a party from a completely different country. I don't see how there errors can be easily identified and corrected. Another downside appears to be reduced scrutiny from people with local knowledge. --Find bruce (talk) 03:29, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
I was attempting to present information of the party rooms that past federal CLP parliamentarians have sat in. However, I am unable to find any citation for Paul Everingham and Nick Dondas, though it seems that they both sat in the Liberal Party room. If anyone could find any suitable citations, could you please add those in the respective articles. I have already added similar information for Grant Tambling and Bernie Kilgariff. Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:18, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
Looks like it's using the new Module:Political party. I've tried a few edits to Module:Political party/C (adding shortname entries and the 1920 Country Party) to try and fix it but it hasn't worked (maybe it will eventually). According to some editors, this module is the best thing ever, is really easy to use, and should replace all other name/colour/link templates as soon as possible, but all I've ever seen are problems caused by trying to jam everything into a global module reading from massive data pages, with little concern about what it breaks, and no tangible benefits demonstrated. --Canley (talk) 11:21, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
I think we should bring it up to the global platform somehow (maybe the talk page)? These pro-one system people will never know about these issues and they will never get fixed unless we bring it up. Marcnut1996 (talk) 11:50, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Since the policies of the new Family First Party seem to be similar to the old one, I don't see a reason why it should be a different colour from its old one, which was #00CCFF. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 12:42, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
I know very little about SA politics, is this party a continuation of at least some politicians and structures of the previous party, or is it it's own distinct party? There are precedents from the Australian Democrats and Democratic Labour Party to have the continuation party included on the page. Catiline52 (talk) 02:22, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
The Democrats have always been the same party. Dropping off the register is not the same thing as dissolving and there's a clear organisational continuity even if there was a big shift in the membership. The DLP also have a continuous line since the 1950s. This new Family First looks like a new organisation that has revived a brand with recognition & loyalty rather than the old party unmerging out of the ashes of the Australian Conservatives. Timrollpickering (talk) 13:53, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
I think it would be better if the new Family First had a slightly different colour to the old one as this is a relaunch rather than a continuation. Frickeg (talk) 20:45, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
I agree with a slightly different colour, especially since the new party seems to be founded by former Labor Party people, and there isn't complete agreement between this version and the old version, it doesn't seem right to treat it as a true continuation. Dauwenkust (talk) 06:44, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Alright then. In that case, how about using #5A58A6 as the colour? It would match its official logo on its website, and purplish colouring seems to be used often for christian political parties. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 23:40, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Okay. If everyone's fine with that, could someone please have a go at adding the color? I've had an attempt myself, but can't seem to get the coding right on the political colors page. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 10:04, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Electoral Maps in Past Australian Federal Elections
A while back there was a short discussion about a particular type of election map showing the two party preferred winner for each state, which resulted in the map being removed. Since then I have seen the style of map on a few other election results, often incorrectly labeled as showing the States and territories 'Won' by each party. Since they are across multiple pages (and as I have gotten more aware of this noticeboard) I thought I might bring it here to whether we should keep this maps on the different election pages they appear on. While as they do provide information as sourced by the AEC, they are at best an interesting bit of trivia about each elections, and at worst can be quite misleading about what happened in the election, especially for American readers who may mistake it for an actual electoral college style result. I think they should be removed as being misleading, as I ended up doing for the 2004 election page, but I thought I might get a wider consensus here before deleting them on other pages and if everyone thinks they are useful I can restore it on the 2004 page. Example here-
States and territories won by the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal/National Coalition. (Popular vote)
I very strongly support this position. The "winner" of a state is meaningless. Our election maps should show the winners of electorates only. Frickeg (talk) 20:48, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Support as above. I much rather prefer a national map that shows in each state or territory, how many seats are won by the respective parties. A national map showing all electorates is quite skewed as the regional electorates are much larger in size and dominates the map. Marcnut1996 (talk) 22:21, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
I do also support the national map which shows how many seats each party one in each state. The electorate map can be misleading, but it is also very informative and gives a better idea of what regions the parties won. I have seen several pages that have them both together, and I think those two are the best combination. Dauwenkust (talk) 02:06, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
I don't like the state totals maps for a couple of reasons - I don't like that they still shade the state by whichever party won the most seats, which is meaningless, but also ... it's a map. If you're just going to show the number of seats each party won, why not do that in a table? In my opinion the standard map should be winning party per electorate, with standard colours (the ones with different shades depending on strength of vote are so difficult to read). Other types of map (but not the state ones that inspired this thread) could potentially appear in other places like the dedicated results pages. Frickeg (talk) 12:16, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
Since there seems to be universal agreement regarding the "state winner" maps, I will try to clean them out. @Frickeg I can see what you mean about the table, though I do think they still help visualise regional differences for some people to whom tables can be difficult to process. However my feelings aren't that strong on the matter. I also agree that with so many parties, the shading can be quite confusing, especially when some parties colours are different shades of another parties colours. Dauwenkust (talk) 13:53, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
Requested move 25 March 2022
The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The result of the move request was: Not Moved as proposed, insufficient evidence provided to support de-capitalization of “Division of” Mike Cline (talk) 12:10, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
Oppose as proposed I'm not sure the nominator has looked at the link cited properly – although it talks about "the electoral division of Pearce", it does reference the division by name twice using capitalisation: "The Division of Pearce consists of" and "Map of the Division of Pearce"; lowercase is only used when calling it an electoral division. Similarly, the AEC profile for Fenner states that "The Division of Fenner covers an area in the north of the ACT consisting of... The Division of Fenner also includes the Jervis Bay Territory." I also checked one division on Ngrams, and the non-capitalised version doesn't even register.
However, I would support changing the titles to "Election results for the Division of ..." which would seem to be a more natural way of saying it. Cheers, Number5719:51, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
MOS:CAPS says only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. If both are used roughly equally, then Wikipedia prefers non capitalisation. AEC uses both. The majority of sources I have looked up use lower case.
ABC News: The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) says it was a "mix-up" that 105 voters in the West Australian division of Pearce were given Victorian Senate ballot papers, which have now been deemed informal., Ms Neilson said as the Senate election was a state-wide result, the incident did not affect House of Representatives vote in the division of Pearce.
WAToday: The existing boundaries for the division of Pearce.
The West Australian: The Liberal division of Pearce, held by Attorney-General Christian Porter, will call for increased road speed limits to reduce fatigue and increase productivity.
News.com.au: Northern Perth suburbs of Girrawheen, Koondoola, Balga and Mirrabooka will also be united in the proposed division of Cowan, which is held by Dr Aly., “The basis for naming the division of Canning would be expanded to acknowledge Sadie Miriam Canning – in recognition of her work to improve Indigenous and rural healthcare in Western Australia.”
The Australian: The division of Pearce spans both Perth's northern and east metropolitan suburbs, peri-urban communities and adjacent rural areas.
Oppose the title is "Dividion of xxxxx", and use of electrol division low case is when it being used as a gerneral term or in the source as quoted with News.com.au: Northern Perth suburbs of Girrawheen, Koondoola, Balga and Mirrabooka will also be united in the proposed division of Cowan, which is held by Dr Aly. where the term being used to describe changes to the boundaries not the seat. Gnangarra05:44, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
The use of lower case "division" as a general term in the media in not an argument that the word "division" is part of the proper name. That's like saying that the name of a suburb is "Suburb of Tuart Hill" because the media refer to it descriptively with a lower case s - "the boundaries of the suburb of Tuart Hill will soon change". Mitch Ames (talk) 06:19, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
This is supported by the preponderance of alternative names used in the news such as "seat of X" or "electorate of X". Steelkamp (talk) 06:07, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
I am not sure how I feel about it over all, I am leaning towards Number57's point of view. However I would say that just because part of an official name is left out in certain official lists does not mean that it is not part of the name. The official name of Massachusetts for example is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and official government sites, both in Massachusetts and in the U.S. Federal government commonly list it as only Massachusetts. This is a sign of a common shortening, not that commonwealth is not part of the name and should not be capitalised when included.
But that is more a quibble on the method of reasoning, in the end as long as the process is consistent I think I am happy.
As an aside I have noticed that the NSW article uses both "State of New South Wales" and "state of New South Wales" so that should also probably be fixed up. Dauwenkust (talk) 13:53, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
Comment The Australian government Style Guide doesn't address this question unfortunately.
Reading the AEC website, their use seems very consistent, and I assume they have an internal style guide they're using. The rule they seem to be following is
When referring to the proper area, capitalise Division. I.e: The Division of Lyons. Same as you would "The Commonwealth of Australia".
When referring to it as a electoral division, do not capitalise. I.e.: The electoral division of Lyons. Same as you would when referring to "The country of Australia". JTdaleTalk~16:36, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
MOS: exists for a reason ("consistent, reader-friendly layouts and formatting"), and a change (even a trivial one) to comply with it is an improvement unless demonstrated otherwise. What's your case for the proposed change making Wikipedia worse? Mitch Ames (talk) 01:44, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
This requested move discussion has a greater impact than just the titles of these pages. It affects all the main division articles as well plus many more articles on towns, localities, etc. I discovered this issue when working on Division of Pearce for WP:GA. This affects every mention of the division of Pearce in that article, and so we need to get this right. Steelkamp (talk) 03:34, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Support - According to https://www.aec.gov.au/Electorates/Redistributions/guidelines.htm "augmented electoral commissions" determine the names. The 2021 Report of the augmented Electoral Commission for Western Australia (which I presume is typical of the other states) consistently capitalises "Division" in "Division of X" in the body text - which could be a styling matter, ie capitalise to indicate importance rather than proper name - but then "Appendix I: Determination of electoral divisions ..." (published in the Commonwealth Government Notices Gazette to make it official) says "the names of the 15 electoral divisions are: Brand [etc]". I.e. the name as explicitly stated by the augmented Electoral Commission - the official decider of such matters according to the Electoral Act section 73 - does not include the words "Division of". Thus "division of" is not part of the proper name, and so ought not be capitalised by Wikipedia, per MOS:CAPS - even if other sources capitalise it to indicate importance. Mitch Ames (talk) 01:39, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Oppose having looked at it further the AEC seems to be fairly consistent with the form Division of X. While it does sometimes list the name without Division when referring to the names of divisions, this looks more like a common shortening, rather then an indication that the name is only "Brand" etc. Dauwenkust (talk) 04:08, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
Support: The isolated capital letter in these titles is rather strange and distracting to the reader, and the "division" doesn't really appear to really be part of the proper names – the essential names being more simply "Fenner", "Burt", "Cooper", etc. In most cases, unless there is strong evidence to do otherwise, I believe Wikipedia wouldn't capitalize terms like "province", "district", and "vilayet", and here "division" seems similar. — BarrelProof (talk) 17:51, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
Oppose In section 4 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 they are referred to as a 'Division' or 'Electoral Division', with a captialised D in both cases. I'd argue that the legislation would be a pretty authoritative source on the subject. Proutk (talk) 00:47, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
That's the same legislation / Electoral Act that explicitly says, in section 73(1), that the names of the divisions shall be determined and published by an augmented Electoral Commission (not by the Electoral Act) - and the names of those divisions, as published and gazetted (e.g. WA, Appendix I; NSW, Appendix J) do not include "division of" in the name of the division. So although the legislation might think the word "division" is Important Enough to capitalise, it's not actually part of the division's official (according the augmented Electoral Commission's notice published in the Gazette) name. Mitch Ames (talk) 09:08, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
Correct, s73(1) does say that State Electoral Commissions manage Divisional names in tandem with their boundaries. Specifically, it says:
"An augmented Electoral Commission for a State shall... determine, by notice published in the Gazette, the names and boundaries of the Electoral Divisions into which the State is to be distributed..."
The Divisional name is separate to the "Division of" portion of the name. If your interpretation was correct, then State ECs could choose to call their divisions whatever they wanted; electorates, divisions, ridings, capitalised or otherwise. s73(1) just empowers the augmented ECs to change a Divisions' name as part of a state redistribution. The commissions don't publish the "Division of" part in the Gazette because that part of the name is already established as per the Act. Do you have anything to show that this interpretation is incorrect? Proutk (talk) 06:42, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
The commissions don't publish the "Division of" part in the Gazette because that part of the name is already established as per the Act. — Which section of the Act says that "the name of the Division shall be 'Division of X'", or words to that effect? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:20, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
If only legislation were so simple! I'll walk you through how it works.
Section 4 of the Act defines the term "Division" to mean "an Electoral Division for the election of a member of the House of Representatives". It explicitly uses capitalisation throughout. Note also that other single-word terms in s4 such as "answers" and "compartment" are not capitalised, and others still such as "Roll" or "Territory" are. Further on, s56 states that "Each State shall be distributed into Electoral Divisions" (aka "Divisions" as per s4.) s73(1) states that the Augmented ECs determine the "names and boundaries of the Electoral Divisions (aka "Divisions")". If you are determining the name of a thing, you are not renaming the thing, you are giving the thing a name. In this case, the thing is unambiguously defined as an "Electoral Division", or "Division" for short. The legislation empowers bodies to name each "Electoral Division". There isn't a specific line that says "The name of the Division shall be 'Division of X'" because most legislation isn't written like that. s4 of the Act is a definitional section that gives certain words meaning for the purposes of the Act. If it's capitialised, it's not just done for a laugh. Proutk (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
It explicitly uses capitalisation throughout — that does not necessarily make those words "names". For example the Electoral Commissioner is a person with a name - Tom Rogers - that is not "Electoral Commissioner". A "Justice of the Peace" is a person with a name (examples) that is not "Justice of the Peace. A Returning Officer is a person with a name that is not "Returning Officer". A "Division" is an Electoral Division with a name that is not "Division...".
There isn't a specific line that says "The name of the Division shall be 'Division of X'" — Exactly. But there is a specific line in section 73(1) that says "An augmented Electoral Commission ... shall ... determine, by notice published in the Gazette, the names ... of the Electoral Divisions", and there are Gazettes published by those augmented Electoral Commissions (e.g. [2] Appendix I, [3] Appendix J) that do specifically say (for example): "the names of the 15 electoral divisions are: Brand [etc]". Mitch Ames (talk) 11:48, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
Oppose - "Division" is part of the proper noun, such as Division of Wikipedia. The word can also be used as a common noun, such as the division of Wikipedia, referring to the division. What is more important is merging the articles on the same division where they have been renamed. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:40, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Candidates of the 2022 Australian federal election - potential dispute
There is a potential dispute between me and this user on the Candidates of the 2022 Australian federal election page, regarding the use of the "Liberal Democrats" name. I also note this user also was only active since late February and almost only edits on 2022 election pages. I want to get your opinions on this topic, see the talk page for the user's and my reasonings. Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:00, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
Percy Quirke
I think I need a little assistance regarding Percy Quirke, the MP for the South Australian seat of Stanley. Some sources have him as Labor, others have him as Independent during his time as MP for Stanley from 1941-1956. Any solid evidence would be appreciated. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 15:03, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
This article says that Quirke resigned from the Labor Party in August 1948 after being suspended for a year for saying he was not sorry the prices referendum was defeated. --Canley (talk) 15:25, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I was a bit confused because of sources saying he was Labor after the initial expulsion, but I've done some browsing on Trove and most articles mention him specifically as "Independent", plus it's what both Colin Hughes and Dean Jaensch's references state. So it seems fairly certain he contested elections after 1948 specifically as an "Independent". Kirsdarke01 (talk) 07:12, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
Liberal Party factions
Ivar the Boneful raised a good point on the National Right (Liberal Party of Australia) article which I think is worth discussing. Ivar asks if this is a real "faction" or a temporary grouping/alliance around Dutton. I've had a very brief look into it (one research paper from 1989, doi:10.1080/00323268908402092) and I think it's worth taking another look at how we approach Liberal Party factions.
While the Sydney Morning Herald article is a really high quality source, it is very limited in scope. It only looks at the current parliament, whose composition has already changed since it was written. It will change again at the upcoming federal election.
Taking a look at this paper from 1989, the authors list a few previous papers:
In 1982, there are four distinct groups: neoliberalists, 'consensual conservaties', and a divided conservative group concerned with either moral or economic dimensions
In 1983, there are three distinct groups: Deakinites, centrist anti-socialists, and laissez-faire capitalists
In 1985, there are two groups, the wets and dries
In 1988, there are two groups, the wets and dries
And they conclude that in 1989, there are three groups: progressives (split into four sub-groups), economic rationalists, and conservatives.
We already know and explain that the wets and dries grouping is still largely around. But I think it's worth considering how the present groups line up to the 1989 analysis. It's basically the same thing. You have a progressive, small-l group on the left, a moderate economic group in the middle, and a socially conservative group on the right. This matches the Moderate, Centre Right, and National Right we have now (we only have articles for the first and the latter).
User:5225C agree 100% with your analysis. It's not like the Labor Party where there are clearly defined factions with historical continuity. I agree these articles should be merged into a single Factions of the Liberal Party of Australia article. We could approach it in a couple different ways - either chronologically (1980s, Howard Era, etc.) or by ideology. I would be inclined to have two major headers - liberalism and conservatism - as those have been the consistent philosophical strands. Then you could have smaller headings for e.g. Christian right, libertarians, wets and dries, etc. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 15:40, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
I think it'd be very difficult to write these articles in a coherent way given the changeability of these factions over time. The Liberals have never had formal factions in any state that I'm aware of, often having personality-based groupings that are prone to change, and although Labor have had coherent "Left" and "Right" blocs for decades, their sub-factions are fluid and ever-changing. I think the result would be interesting if it could be done well, I just don't know how to do it in a way that isn't a dogs breakfast short of doing a surrogate retelling of the entire party's history through its internal workings. It's something that could very easily just turn into recentish POV focusing on whatever factions contributors know something about, in a way that I'm not sure would be helpful. The Drover's Wife (talk) 08:55, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
I'm a bit more optimistic of our chances. There is some good academic literature on the subject and I don't think we need to get bogged down in party history to write on it. I share your concern for recentism but I think it can be effectively countered with careful structuring. 5225C (talk • contributions) 03:51, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
It is the kind of thing that is going to take a heck of a lot of effort to not be a dog's breakfast. For example, it's a pretty hopeless endeavour if it isn't broken down by state, especially in the Liberal Party, which has never had particularly strong federal factions to the extent that it's had them at all. In the ALP's case, it's going to be difficult to say much more than the left and right factions existed without tracing back the history of shifting union alliances and the sub-groupings around various personalities and unions, which again have often differed in different states. The original post highlights some of the problems with this approach - all of the things listed are ideological cohorts within the caucus, not factions. There is nothing to suggest that they necessarily organised together or even supported one another - it can't account for actual factional differences like the relatively non-ideological Kroger vs. whoever is anti-Kroger this year divide in Victoria, or the factional role played by someone like Alex Hawke in New South Wales. An article that just goes on about wets and dries like they're factions that necessarily exist would be worse than nothing.
The detail of the SMH article cited in the "Moderates" article actually illustrates the problems well. "Scott Morrison is the titular head of the Morrison Club/Centre Right group. Outside NSW, where the Centre Right is an organised faction, this grouping is the least formally structured of the three main groups. It doesn’t meet on a regular basis and is really several overlapping groups with shared interests and Morrison as its figurehead...Morrison’s club primarily consists of MPs who entered parliament when he did, in 2007: Alex Hawke, the factional organiser of the Centre Right in NSW, Queenslander Stuart Robert and West Australian Steve Irons. This core group is also defined by their shared faith (all are members of the Prayer Group – more on that below) and their “let’s get things done” approach. Ben Morton, another West Australian and, like Morrison, a former state division director, is one of the PM’s closest and most able lieutenants but if Morrison were not in the parliament, Morton’s philosophical home would be the National Right." Trying to write up these parliamentary groupings that are basically "MPs currently allied to so-and-so" as if they're something more substantive (in the way of the Labor Left and Right Factions, not including their sub-groupings) basically leads to just making stuff up. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:48, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
Country Party breakaways in 1930s-1940s
I'm looking through UWA election page (noting it's not accurate, as pointed out by members of this wikiproject) and this results page from APH, I noticed that in 1934 Australian federal election, there is an "Australian Country Party" in Victoria (see also UWA - 1934 Senate Victoria). What is this party, is it a breakaway and should it be counted as part of the coalition in the results statistics in the election page?
And if we have more details about this Queensland Country Party, then I am thinking of setting it as a new article (currently a redirect) and describe it as a breakaway that refused to join the merged Country-UAP/Nationalist. It will consist of two breakway periods:
I've got Colin A. Hughes' Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 in front of me, and here's what it says about the 1934 election: "The U.A.P. and Country Party ran joint Senate teams, but competed in a number of House seats. In Victoria the Country Party executive sought a pledge from candidates to follow caucus decisions; federal members refused to give such a pledge, and pro-executive candidates nominated against them as Australian Country Party candidates." --Canley (talk) 00:53, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
For the 1943 Queensland one, here's the summary from Hughes: "The Opposition parties were led by Fadden as Country Party leader; W. M. Hughes was officially leader of the U.A.P. but Menzies was unofficially regarded as leader by some U.A.P. candidates. In Queensland the U.A.P. and that element of the Country Party (led by Fadden) disposed to close association with it ran together as the Country-National Party, but co-operated with the remainder of the Country Party. The number of independent candidates was unusually large." Also, Hughes says that the seat won by the Queensland Country Party was Maranoa, so that would be Charles Adermann. --Canley (talk) 01:03, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the info @Canley:, am I right to say that the Queensland Country Party in 1943 should technically be part of the Coalition, just that they decided to run independently but with co-operation from the CNO? And for the 1936 one, it acts more like a temporary breakaway but still part of the Coalition too? Just thinking how we can incorporate these information into the respective state National Party articles and the two elections. Marcnut1996 (talk) 21:42, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
I feel like this raises a much broader question about the statewide stats, given the amount of times where this situation (state executive and parliamentary party run candidates against one another) has happened on both sides of politics in different states. My inclination would be to have separate party totals for each ticket and acknowledge that there's not really a "Coalition" figure in the circumstances, because the only alternative is to just pick an outcome and run with it and ignore the nuances. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:51, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)
It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.
The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.
Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.
Editors may find utility in a list I have compiled of candidates in the upcoming federal election who have a reasonable chance at winning and do not already have articles at User:Onetwothreeip/Candidates 2022. They would all be the primary topic, as they would all be more notable than any articles that already exist at their respective names. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:39, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
I have created a draft for former Ryde mayor and Bennelong candidate Jerome Laxale. However, I'm not confident in the draft meeting the general notability guidelines WP:GNG. I think there are enough secondary sources but I am unsure about the significant coverage of Laxale. I have included as many of his controversies mentioned in the media in the draft. Personally, I think he is notable enough for being Mayor for a total of 4 years (which is rare in City of Ryde), but I don't think this is enough to satisfy WP:NPOL. Additionally, unlike new articles for Cassandra Fernando and Linda White who are likely to win their respective seats, Laxale's chance of winning Bennelong is not certain. I welcome any suggestions or opinions to improve the draft (or next steps, e.g. keep as draft) before we move the draft to mainspace. Marcnut1996 (talk) 08:53, 2 May 2022 (UTC)
I am inclined to believe that Jerome Laxale is a notable subject per WP:GNG and not NPOL, but I would want to hear another opinion as well. There seems to be enough references that discuss Laxale to support an article regardless of the election outcome. He appears to be notable for more than one event. Onetwothreeip (talk) 22:43, 2 May 2022 (UTC)
The Fernando and White AfDs are a predictably silly situation when people jump the gun, even when their election is patently obvious. Re Laxale - I think it's borderline but on the side of notability (as a mayor, not as a candidate). He's been a very public figure for a long time. I think the last two paragraphs of the controversies section are a bit dubious from a BLP perspective - one seems very questionably related, the other is very trivial. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:08, 3 May 2022 (UTC)
Leadership spills and leadership elections categories
These two are no longer interchangable anymore, articles that are now leadership elections were previously mis-named leadership spills and hence were in those categories. Now that they have been differentiated, the categories may be split but I would prefer they are changed to "spills and elections" to cover both (since both result in the election of a party leader articles of successful spills also include leadership elections). Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:54, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
Agreed. They should just be called 'elections' and the text should describe the election was due to the result of a spill. Catiline52 (talk) 07:23, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
The problem with that is the notable failed spills (of which there's quite a few, particularly in recent years). I tend to think using "leadership election" when no election took place because the leader was never ousted is a bit of a misnomer. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:01, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
We could have Category:Australian leadership spills as a subcategory of Category:Australian leadership elections. Steelkamp (talk) 12:50, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Explaining redistribution moves in electorate articles
One thing that, for all our detailed coverage, we still do really poorly (albeit because it's difficult to do) is explaining how the geography of electorates has moved over time with redistributions. We explain the partisan changes of seats and swings over time, but we often don't explain the geographical changes that went with it. It occurred to me last night as I was rewriting an article on an one-time Warrnambool-based MP for Corangamite that it must be a bit baffling to read given our article only really talks about the Corangamite, which has contracted to a small area at the complete opposite end of the Great Ocean Road. Does anyone have any ideas about how we could do a better job of this? The Drover's Wife (talk) 00:59, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
I've tried to do this at Division of Pearce. That division has had a large change in its geography since it was created. You can have a look at what I've done there.
Some issues that people might encounter is that redistribution reports from before 2000 are not available online. Steelkamp (talk) 05:17, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
I think that's vastly better than most other attempts I've seen - nice work! Ideally I think it could do with a bit more general explanation and context (along the lines of "Pearce had a mixture of urban and rural areas, covering the Swan Valley, the Perth Hills and part of the western Wheatbelt"), a bit of coverage of any significant political ramifications of those moves, and less focus on the local government areas, because I don't think they're hugely informative on their own - I lived and/or worked not far from the City of Swan for years, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what "the City of Swan north of Roe Highway" referred to too closely without a map. As I said though, still better than just about every other article in this respect. I will have to see if I can start to assemble something along the lines of your Pearce effort for some over my current way. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
I'm not generally in favour of that because it becomes too difficult to define the difference between a rename and an abolition, sources don't really agree, and because it'd turn borderline case articles into an absolute muddle. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:56, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
I agree with The Drover's Wife that it's not possible to draw a bright line between a rename and an abolition - it's not just geography, but the impact that the re-distribution has on voting. At the other extreme to renames are the NSW districts of Macquarie and Electoral district of Murray which as a result of the massive redistribution in 1904 remained on their namesake rivers but retained nothing but the name. Redistributions are difficult to convey in words & I've found it hard to even get reliable information about older changes. The best I have found was the electoral Atlas of New South Wales(eg 1904 redistribution) but sadly the mapping function did not survive in the archive. --Find bruce (talk) 06:19, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
One very rough workaround I adopted for a few old SA electorates where the vague area wasn't obvious from the name was using booth lists (for which we have fairly comprehensive data for SA) to explain movements over time, but I'm not sure how well that works. Ideally we could find some sort of contemporaneous explanation of what went where (as we would for today's changes) but it seems to be hard to come by, and trying to map movements from gazetted boundary descriptions is a pain. The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:24, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
Would be great to do these with maps, but digital geodata only goes back a few years, and as you say it would be a huge pain to plot maps from gazetted descriptions. One of many projects I've been planning for a while is uploading map data of federal and state electorates to Commons going back as far as possible, which can then me used to plot a scalable slippy map. For example, here's a map of Corangamite at the 2019 election: {{Division of Corangamite 2019 map}} --Canley (talk) 00:04, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
Have you seen File:Electorate Perth 1962 2005.gif? It is an animated map of the state electoral district of Perth from 1962 to 2005. Something like this would be useful to show the reader boundary changes over time rather than a big wall of text. Animated means only one image is required, instead of many images to convey boundary changes for an electorate that has existed for decades. Steelkamp (talk) 08:53, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
Both maps are great but I can imagine a bugger to put together. The map Canley mentioned probably works better for larger (and particularly for federal) electorates - for an example, the only reference point for any of the inland boundaries on the initial Corangamite map is really Colac, so the ability to zoom is very helpful in a way that isn't as necessary for small electorates that haven't moved much. I can see that issue repeating across federal/large electorates generally, especially where there's been significant movement. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:58, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
Most cases are completely obvious though, and most of the rest are still easy to determine. There is no good reason for the Division of Denison and the Division of Clark to be two separate articles. This case of one subject split into two articles is unquestionably bad. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:55, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
The "rename"/"abolish" distinction doesn't formally exist for at least federal elections, so it allows for a simple, clear-cut and verifiable approach to organising and finding our electorate content. It means that we essentially take the same approach as the electoral bodies in saying "there was Denison, then there was Clark" and leaving anything else to the opinion of the reader. It also means we have a consistent approach instead of something that has to be argued out according to the opinions of Wikipedia editors over every electorate that has ever had a significant redistribution. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:16, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't think there is anybody who would argue that Clark isn't a renaming of Denison, or any other electorate change. What we have now is inconsistency among our articles where some renamings don't create new articles. We can redirect the Denison title into the article for Clark, since we should follow at least the AEC when they say a seat has been renamed. Onetwothreeip (talk) 04:00, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
I've got a state example of why it is a good idea for separate divisions to be at separate articles. Take Electoral district of Balcatta and Electoral district of Balga. Balcatta was abolished in 1974 and replaced with Balga. Balga was abolished in 1977 and replaced with Balcatta. Balga was recreated in 1983, but it did not replace Balcatta. Balcatta still existed.
Any electoral division name can be recreated at a future redistribution. That is why it is a bad idea to merge electoral divisions with separate names but similar boundaries. Steelkamp (talk) 04:12, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
What Steelkamp said. It seems simple, but it's not and it creates a minefield. Onetwothreeip - the AEC says no such thing since the concept of "renaming" a seat doesn't formally exist. That's literally what I'd just said, and you've apparently just imagined that the AEC supported your position. Where has a case of a "renamed" electorate not created a new article? The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:15, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
Australian Electoral Commission: The renaming of the Division of Denison to Clark is in recognition of the contribution Andrew Inglis Clark (1848–1907) made to Australia’s political and legal systems. If we can't easily classify Balcatta and Balga we can leave those separate, but there is no doubt about Denison and Clark. The Division of Ballaarat was renamed to Ballarat in 1977, and Wikipedia rightly combines the electorates of Ballaarat and Ballarat into the same article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 05:16, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
Nothing else I've seen from the AEC uses that term in this case, so that press release seems to be an outlier. Ballarat isn't a renaming at all in this sense; the electorate spelling just changed to follow the spelling of the town the electorate was named after, and it's really grasping at straws. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:46, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
The Division of Ballaarat was changed to Ballarat, in the same way that Denison was changed to Clark, as the AEC has confirmed. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:26, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
Just repeating what I said at another electoral district merge proposal: My preference is to keep re-named electorates as separate articles. This is consistently done in the federal division articles (Division of Denison → Division of Clark), but not so consistently in the state districts (Division of Clark (state)). I just think it's cleaner—less awkward mismatched piping ([[Electoral district of Dunstan|Norwood]]), no multiple entries in the infobox Namesake field (or multiple infoboxes), and no need to determine an arbitrary threshold of boundary difference for separation/merging (would district articles be merged only if the boundaries are identical? Less than 5% different? 50% different?). I guess I'm also thinking about it from a data/Wikidata standpoint, not everyone's cup of tea of course, but this kind of merge either breaks the link between the Wikidata items and the Wikipedia articles (wikidata:Q5355822 would have no linked article) or if the Wikidata items are merged, they would inaccurately say that Frank Nieass was the member for Dunstan in 1938. --Canley (talk) 05:50, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
It would be if it's a renaming of the same electorate that the article should stay the same, regardless of boundaries changing. If it's a new electorate, it would be a new article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 09:53, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
Electoral Maps in Past Australian Federal Elections (part 2)
I think I could do something like this, it's called a hexbin map and doesn't look too difficult to do. I won't have time until a while after the election but after that I'm happy to look into it and put up some prototypes. --Canley (talk) 04:15, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
I feel like this is a bit of a novelty that hasn't been adopted yet as something seen as generally useful. The geographical maps serve a purpose in the sense of who won where, and the parliamentary chamber breakdown (as at Parliament of Australia) clearly visually sets out the breakdown by party. The "new" "maps" just seem like a less useful way to cover exactly the same ground as the parliamentary chamber method. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:22, 21 May 2022 (UTC)
There is a potential edit war in Template:Cabinet of Australia regarding the formatting of the ministry list. One user (who edited all pre-Gillard ministries to suit their format) prefers to list the member parliamentary information (when the member is an MP/Senator and of what seat) within the ministry list and showing the "Hon" (against MOS:PREFIX). Others like myself are more for simplicity, where the party column is not even needed for the current cabinet. Any opinions will be welcomed. Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:17, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
I'm usually pretty good with researching old figures with Trove, but I've found a politician who seems to be a huge character but whose story I just can't make any coherent sense of whatever. The Sydney Morning Herald's obituary of him (and other obituaries upon his death) utterly contradicts the parliamentary profile, and I literally can't pin down a damned thing prior to 1871 (when I can place him as a newspaper editor in Gulgong). I initially thought the parliamentary library had just done better research, but it looks like they've largely based it on this 1874 profile. Neither article has much in the way of dates that would assist in trying to put some sort of definite chronology on anything. I was really hoping some of you who are also good at this stuff might be able to have a try and hopefully have better luck. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:03, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
I found a few more references in Trove, but not much:
Helped former Qld premier Arthur Macalister write a draft bill for a Goldfields Act in Queensland (1869)
It's not mentioned in the parliament bio or the obituary that I can see, but there's a lot of stories about him being charged with larceny and misappropriation in 1894 (e.g. [5][6][7].
Thanks for the assist Canley! I've had a few breakthroughs (multiple ways of spelling his name at different times was complicating the picture), and I'm coming to the conclusion that the SMH obituary might just be complete fiction because literally nothing in it prior to his election to parliament seems to check out with sources from the time. The parliamentary library seems to basically have been right (excepting a couple of things I can't verify and suspect might have been errors), and I now wind up running into the same dead end they did in 1862. Which might be the best I'm going to get here. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:34, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
He got a brief mention in the appendix to Australian men of mark Vol 2 published in 1889, but it doesn't clarify things much & I am dubious about its accuracy as it gets easily verifiable details wrong - first Archbishop was George Browne in 1536
De Courcy Browne, Thomas Frederick, M.L.A., was born in Malta, and belongs to an old Irish family, originally from Devonshire, the first of the family who settled in Ireland being John Browne, the first Protestant Archbishop of Dublin in 1546. Mr. De Courcy Browne was educated in Ireland, matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, and arrived in Victoria in 1853. He has ever since been connected with the mining industry, and has been a chairman of various mining courts and boards in the Eastern colonies. He established a code of mining laws in British Columbia, and is the author of several handy books on the mining laws of this colony. Mr. De Courcy Browne formerly represented Mudgee in the Legislative Assembly, and is at present member for Wentworth. He is Grand Inspector of Masonic lodges in this colony, and is editor of the Freemason.
While it refers to him matriculating, I think this in the sense of being enrolled at the university rather than graduating, but even so, like his parliamentary bio says this is dubious - he wouldn't be the first man of that era to have invented aspects of his early life. Find bruce (talk) 21:15, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
Thank you both for that digging. I've never come across an example of obituaries/biographies being so blatantly inaccurate to this extent before. The claim about him establishing a code of mining laws in British Columbia is an entirely new one, and I've not come across any other source that placed him in Canada before (though he is generally credited with = various codes of mining regulations in Australia). The confusion of him with T. A. Browne is another level of slack! There were some really strange ones I came across: one of the most challenging was that many sources credit him with editing the Gympie Times while he was in Gympie, but that paper at that time is in Trove and the only mention of him basically suggests that the paper hated his guts. The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:25, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
The beauty of wikipedia
The perennial issue of politicians editing their own article has popped up again, this time Catherine Cusack (politician), where the editor either is, or is pretending to be the subject of the article. There is also a new SPA making similar edits. I would appreciate some more views & eyes on the article. --Find bruce (talk) 22:51, 26 May 2022 (UTC)
Done Happy with how quickly the issue has been fixed. The template has been much adopted by editors here - a quick count showed nearly half of the 2,659 Articles with excerpts are Australian election results. Find bruce (talk) 09:59, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
Election results
@Yilku1: has made significant changes to the results in by-elections to include the distribution of preferences, eg 2018 Wentworth by-election. I have reverted these edits as such a major change to the way in which we present results should be the subject of consensus. My difficulty with the approach is that it goes to far into the detail of the distribution of preferences with no benefit for the reader. --Find bruce (talk) 05:48, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
Yeah, these are wonk-level results, not the level usual readers would be looking for (and readers who were looking for that wouldn't come here). The presentation then makes it unnecessarily confusing for general readers. These changes are generating problems rather than solutions. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:03, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
This is a template in the Irish elections since they have ranked voting often have three or four party races (rather than just a two candidate preferred). I can see the applicability of this kind of table in terms of creating a pseudo-3-party preferred for seats like Brisbane or Richmond where the '2 candidate preferred' section doesn't highlight that there were 3 parties with reasonable competition for the seat. Highlighting every single preference flow seems overkill for this purpose though. With a lot of media/research about the decline of the major parties votes and rise of minor parties/independents, there'll probably be a newer way to measure these types of races in Australia. Rather than jump the gun, it's probably a better idea to wait and keep the current table rather than use an extremely wonk-y table like this. Catiline52 (talk) 09:52, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
This is the same thing do in the Irish elections to show the full results. With this table is clearer the flow of votes. With the old table what should you look? Dave Sharma is the most voted but he didn't win? Why there is a Two-party-preferred result and Two-candidate-preferred result? Which is more important? With the Irish table you know the Two-candidate-preferred result is the one you should look. Yilku1 (talk) 17:45, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
We can have both tables in the articles. If any editors are motivated enough to create these full preferences tables, they should be encouraged. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:59, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Diagram of preference flows for the Braddon by-election 2018
I think these preference distribution tables are good, but only as an collapsed/expandable section and not replacing the current tables – they're too unwieldy and complex, but if someone is interested and doesn't know how the preference system works or how someone in second or third place can win, they can click on the preference distribution table to expand it. I do find it interesting and have tried a few ways of displaying preference flows using a Sankey diagram (see right). We've had a few discussions about the two-party count appearing in the table where there's a two-candidate result (which is more important). A few things have been tried like placing 2PP after the table with a gap, but nothing firmly decided. --Canley (talk) 00:36, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
Diagram of preference flows at the Eden-Monaro by-electionI quite like the sankey diagrams as the size of the flow is much clearer to me. With more candidates though it too gets complex - eg Eden Monaro with 14 candidates. We also need to remember too that the vast majority of elections and by-elections the distribution of preferences makes little difference to the outcome. Interestingly in Wentworth for example Antony Green only shows where the preferences ended up rather than the 14 previous counts [8]Find bruce (talk) 06:35, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
Parliamentary Secretaries and Assistant Ministers in lists?
I know ever since Turnbull changed the titles of ParSec's to Assistant Ministers there's been a shift in convention as to including them in the infobox, a matter seemingly confused by Abbott's use of titles of Assistant Minister titles for those serving on the outer ministry.
Further there seems to be some misunderstanding among some users as to what Parliamentary Secretaries/Assistant Ministers are. A ParSec/Assistant Minister is not a Minister, rather per the Ministers of State Act 1952 up to 12 MP's or Senators may be appointed Parliamentary Secretaries, while they sit in the executive they are not Ministers, of which up to 30 may be appointed. I just wanted to get that point clear as I can foresee an emerging edit war on the subject likely to emerge here and here with a user appearing to conflate them with the Ministers Assisting.
So to cut to the chase I was hoping to establish some consensus as to whether or not ParSec's/Assistant Ministers are to now be included in infoboxes.
Also to establish a central point to touch base on the differences between ministers and parsec's, rather then having the argument in contributions of various pages.The Tepes (talk) 14:11, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
I don't see an issue with having them in ministry lists for individual governments - they're formal positions and are generally included elsewhere in coverage of new ministries. I also don't have a problem in principle adding them into ministerial position articles, but would be concerned about the potential for particularly long-serving ministry articles that have had multiple different parliamentary secretary roles getting bloated to all hell. As for the difference between them: you are correct and I don't really see that it's arguable apart from casual misuse of language with formal definitions/misunderstandings of that language. I'm not surprised that there's confusion between "minister assisting" and "assistant minister" because it's not something that would be immediately apparent to most people (even if the factual distinction is clear) so it's probably one of those things that'll need explaining on multiple occasions over time. The Drover's Wife (talk) 00:44, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
Re infoboxes, I would personally say it should depend on the individual person. If being a parliamentary secretary / assistant minister is the apex of their parliamentary career, or one of say two or three ministerial portfolios, then let's include it because it's relatively significant to their career (but let's also include it in prose within the article, with a source, because this seems to be frequently neglected). However, if the person has held five+ different portfolios and progressed to senior ministerial office, we should admit their assistant minister roles for the sake of succinctness rather than have an infobox longer than the article that doesn't really add anything for the reader. ITBF (talk) 09:56, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
@ITBF: - this didn't seem to be a question about infoboxes, but rather ministry lists (for individual ministerial positions and government ministries). The Drover's Wife (talk) 13:06, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
David Pocock (party)
Just thinking, in the Senate composition and member pages, if we should list David Pocock as an independent with the grey colour, or as a David Pocock party member (with some colour) since the party is AEC-registered. Marcnut1996 (talk) 23:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
He's an independent, and we should treat him as such. Unlike the Nick Xenophon Team etc, there is no structure of a political party with an executive board, it's just Pocock. There's a history of independents registering with the AEC to get a name above the line, as Brian Harradine (Registered as 'Harradine Group') had done, as it's a lot harder to get elected otherwise as most votes are above the line and it minimises voter confusion. Every single bit of media calls him an independent too. Catiline52 (talk) 23:54, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
Pocock should be listed as an independent per Catiline52. Frankly I think people like Rex Patrick, Glenn Lazarus, Tim Storer should also be listed as independents because their "parties" are just a way to get their name above the line on the ballot papers. Pocock has taken it to the logical extreme of just having his name. Jacqui Lambie is a bit trickier given she has had other people elected under her name. ITBF (talk) 00:03, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
Yes, logically, Pocock is an independent. But legally, he represents a party. We can't pretend the latter is not the case. I support listing him (and similar candidates) as independents in a broad sense, but we surely have to also somehow acknowledge the legal reality of his status. HiLo48 (talk) 00:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
I think it's a "reality" that's pretty irrelevant - he's just an independent who complied with the requirements to have his name in the box. Often these cases are a little more complex because there's at least the notion of a "team" around them (as with Lazarus, Patrick and Storer) following the literal examples of Xenophon and Lambie who elected running-mates. Here, that isn't the case - he's basically universally described as an independent in secondary sources, there's no pretense of having a broader party, just an independent who complied with the bare minimum requirements for an ATL ballot line. You'd struggle to even source the "party" notion without reference to primary sources. The Drover's Wife (talk) 03:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
Strongly agree that he's an independent, which is also how APH lists him. They do the same for Patrick as well, and I think it's usually fairly easy to tell when something is a party and when it isn't. If they run any candidates beyond the single Senate ticket, that's a pretty good sign. Harradine, Patrick, Storer, Pocock are clearly independents; Lazarus is slightly trickier as he ran lower house candidates. APH (as opposed to AEC) is a good guide. Frickeg (talk) 07:46, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
Frickeg's solution makes a lot of sense to me as a general resolution to these issues that can be applied and makes sense across the historical examples. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:57, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
Agreed. In this example, while Pocock had a running mate the media coverage universally stated that he was running as an independent. The running mate was there only to get him above the line, which is really important to getting elected in the Senate. Nick-D (talk) 11:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
Yes, he effectively stood as an independent, and we can describe him that way. but to be proper;y encyclopaedic, we should also mention what's been described above, and why he did it - created his own party so he could get that place above the line on the ballot paper. He is a different kind of independent from those who don't create their own party. HiLo48 (talk) 22:30, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
He's clearly sitting as an independent and the party is nothing more than a technical device to make his candidacy ballot paper friendly. Has anyone ever disputed Brian Harradine being listed as an independent? Timrollpickering (talk) 11:26, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
Like many others here, you are missing or ignoring my point, and arguing against something different from what I am saying. YES, he IS an independent!!!! BUT, we really should ALSO note that he used a "technical device to make his candidacy ballot paper friendly". It's an important legal difference between him and independents without their own parties. It helps explain how and why he won a seat, and others didn't. It surely belongs in an encyclopaedia article about the election. HiLo48 (talk) 11:55, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
We're understanding your point fine - but disputing the significance of using a "technical device to make his candidacy ballot paper friendly", or that it is an "important legal difference between him and independents without their own parties", given that I'm pretty sure there's never been an independent elected to the Senate under the present system without an ATL ballot line. It's also speculation that's minimally, if at all, referenceable to secondary sources in the context of Pocock. It's a discussion more relevant to a general Senate voting article than anyone's individual biography. I'd also point out that we haven't generally queried ex-major party independents who remained members of their parties in a general membership capacity (a not unusual phenomenon when people get kicked out of caucus) in this way and that most other sources generally don't either. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:24, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
Sourcing is the key here, I think. Do we have any good sources describing him as a party? Pocock surprised me. There was a lot of media support and exposure but they were all talking about David Pocock the man and not the notional party. He polled higher than the Greens - an astonishing feat in Canberra - and those preferences pushed him above the Liberal Zed Seselja who was way out of step with his constituency. It was all the man and his personality in the media reports. Using the AEC to fabricate some political party as notable is very contrived, IMEO. If we don't have any good secondary sources then we can't reasonably call him a party. I take HiLo's point that technically there was a party with a running mate and so on but the reality is that it was all one candidate getting all the exposure and if we push the "party" line we are going to mislead our readers into thinking that maybe there was more to it than a technical device. I wouldn't rule out there being a Pocock Party in future as an organisation standing candidates in Territory and Reps elections - and good luck to them! - but I think that we really need some solid sourcing before we create an article or whatever. --Pete (talk) 00:10, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
There's not a lot of early stuff there, and what's there is pretty obvious. The early parties we struggle with tend to fall into harder territory: the pre-1920 parties where it's often debatable to what extent they were indeed a party and the more complex party splits, and a name and a vague date (without even a state) doesn't tell us much. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:13, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
I think this is an opportunity to discuss whether Six News is even reliable. They say on their editorial policies page that they issue corrections after reporting on incorrect information. I'm not entirely sure whether most or even any articles they publish are looked over by an editor of sorts. Anyone have any more information, or examples of when they have retracted something? Steelkamp (talk) 11:21, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
It's run by a 14-year old, so I'd take it with a grain of salt in many cases. I don't think it's a never-use situation, given that he's done interviews with prominent figures and such. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:49, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
It's not a bad list, including for example many of the local parties that pre-dated the Greens in NSW. It's not however complete - no Australian Gruen, Central Coast Green, Centre Unity, just to pick some examples from 1990 and does have errors, such as Irene Dunn's Environment Independents, which is listed as 1995, but ran at the 1990 election. I haven't looked at how it deals with the various communist & socialist parties. It might give a lead, but I wouldn't use that list as a source. Find bruce (talk) 00:26, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
New Victoria district boundaries maps
I've uploaded all 88 maps of the new district boundaries for the 2022 Victorian state election and added some for the newly created or recreated districts (eg. Electoral district of Glen Waverley) in their respective articles last night. For the maps on the already existing districts, should I either: (1) Wait until the election or new members are sworn in; (2) Replace the existing maps as soon as possible; or (3) Add them in right now and remove the old maps once the next parliament begins its term? I would also like to ask on whether you want to see interactive maps just like for UK constituencies (eg. Boston and Skegness (UK Parliament constituency)#Boundaries) —twotwofourtysix(talk || edits)03:03, 10 July 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for doing those! I generally roll out new maps when the parliament is dissolved and the election campaign begins, so I don't think it would have to wait until results are declared, MPs are sworn in or the parliament term begins. For new seats like Glen Waverley you can put them in straight away of course. --Canley (talk) 06:24, 10 July 2022 (UTC)
List of ethnic minority members of the Parliament of Australia
Hello! I'm having a go at creating an article for non-Anglo-Celtic Australian parliamentarians, noting the media coverage of Albanese being the first PM from a non-Anglo-Celtic background, and using List of ethnic minority politicians in the United Kingdom as a loose precedent.
Current attempt is at Draft:List of ethnic minority members of the Parliament of Australia. Curious to hear thoughts of anyone here on whether this seems notable enough for a list article, how much referencing is needed, and whether the classification of ethnicities seems accurate/appropriate. Any and all feedback is welcome!
I'm not really a fan of this list in its current scope, although I do like the formatting. The list is formatted a lot better than List of Asian Australian politicians.
Ethnic minority is not really a well defined term in Australia. What makes an Italian Australian politician an ethnic minority, but an Irish Australian politician not? To many people, they are both just European. What you're really making is a list of non-Anglo-Celtic Australian politicians.
I think I agree with the comment just above, although I am tempted to say that we should just have a list of Australian politicians, and not try to label people further. --Bduke (talk) 05:30, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
I think Steelkamp has the right idea here, though "European Australian politicians" would be so expansive as to be a bit silly. I'm indifferent as to the formatting, because the general list lacks a lot of the detail and context of the other lists. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:19, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
This is just a bad idea. The list will never be complete. The term ethnic minority is poorly defined. Despite what is probably an attempt to show how inclusive Australia is, in a way, such a list would be divisive, because it is saying the people on the list are different from "normal" Australians. HiLo48 (talk) 04:27, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
As a development that's likely to make a mess of our articles on the Morrison Government's ministries, it's been reported over the weekend that Morrison was secretly sworn in as second Health and Finance ministers during 2020 and as a second Resources minister in 2021. The first two were COVID contingency measures and the rationale for the third is unclear at present. This story implies that he may have also held other portfolios. Presumably the dates these measures came into effect, and ended, will be published soon. Does anyone have any bright ideas how to handle this? It really is highly unusual given that the ministry list published by the government is meant to be definitive. Nick-D (talk) 11:07, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
Is this even a real ministry, or is it a pseudo-ministry? How can one be a minister without being sworn in by the governor general? I think we should wait for more details, because something seems fishy about this. Steelkamp (talk) 13:07, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
+1 on waiting for more details and not using tabloid sources like news.com.au. Would note that acting ministers are appointed without reference to the governor-general (see here) which may have been the mechanism used. ITBF (talk) 14:05, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
The Governor General released a statement today confirming he appointed Morrison to several ministerial roles under Section 64 of the constitution ([9]). This story says he was appointed resources minister in April 2021. Constitutional expert Anne Twomey has written an article the matter [10]. We'll need to cover this in the Second Morrison ministry article given it appears he was a substantive minister in these portfolios, but it might take a few days for the details and dates to be clear. Nick-D (talk) 09:48, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
It's still not clear to me that he was actually the minister for most of these portfolios. It appears that the GG signed the necessary instruments to appoint him to those roles, but in the absence of gazette entries and that the department heads did not know they had been signed, I wonder if he was never the relevant minister, but merely had everything in place to be able to become minister at short notice if required. It does need to be mentioned in the relevant articles, once it is clear what "it" was. --Scott DavisTalk13:38, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
I agree, maybe the Solicitor-General's report on the coming Monday might clarify some things on whether he was the relevant ministers or just the PM with additional joint authorisation over certain matters. Marcnut1996 (talk) 00:12, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
ScoMo wasn't running these ministeries or acting in any major capacity. It seems he was sworn in as a contingency measure but didn't get any extra pay or do the job or answer questions in Parliament or any of the usual ministerial functions. The ministers named in the Admin Regs kept on doing their jobs, in most cases without any knowledge that ScoMo had been sworn in.
Certainly an odd occurence but I don't think we need list ScoMo as Health Minister or whatever if he didn't actually do the job.
Has this happened before in times of crisis, do we know? If they were secret, then how would we know? John Curtin could have been swown in as a co-Minister for Navy under some sort of wartime emergency power and if it wasn't promulgated then it would be difficult to discover.
My guess is that it will eventually deserve no more than a sentence in the BLP article. Despite the usual sources making a fuss, there was nothing illegal about it, just unusual. ScoMo has indicated he's not going to resign over it and it's unlikely he'll face any pressure from his own party to do so; the last thing Dutton wants is a by-election where the teal independents would be on fire. --Pete (talk) 00:41, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
It now seems clear that the secret swearings in were just like any other change in ministry, except this time, they were done in secret. We now know when he was sworn in, and which ministries he was sworn into. This means we can and should treat the secret ministries like any other ministry. We as Wikipedians don't have the option of denying these are real ministries when it now seems clear they are. Saying they aren't real because he didn't do anything in them is original research. Surely rejecting an offshore gas exploration permit shows he used his secret ministerial powers.
With regards to John Curtin, at least according to Bill Shorten, Curtin was not sworn into any secret ministries. I'm sure the government is now combing the archives to determine if anything similar has ever happened before.
Salaries are an irrelevant issue. Cabinet ministers don't get paid more if they hold more ministries. Scott Morrison should not and did not get paid more for assuming more ministries, just as someone gaining a ministry in a regular cabinet reshuffle does not get paid more just because they hold more ministries.
We can't ignore the thing but nor does it deserve to be a monster issue affecting scores of other articles. Are there any reliable sources saying that he headed up the various departments in any meaningful sense? I've seen memes and shock-horror political commentary showing ScoMo as Minister This and Minister That but that's hardly deep political analysis for the ages.
No. These were not changes of ministry like any other. That's ridiculous. The Ministers for Health etc. continued to do their jobs. They hadn't been removed or replaced or retired which is the normal case. There were no gazettals, no notices, no press releases. It was done secretly, remember?
WP:RECENT rules the day here, I think. My guess that eventually the standalone article will be rolled into the ScoMo article and maybe there will be a bunch of footnotes to the effect that Morrison was sworn in as secret co-minister during the pandemic. Secret co-minister - I like it! --Pete (talk) 06:29, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
@APNOneTwo: I've reverted your edit on that article, but I'll take my thoughts here -- I don't really see the need to change the existing pendulum. The colours, imo, are helpful to distinguish between margins of electorates, and even for those who might not be able to tell the difference, the colours aren't dark enough to make the text difficult to read -- whereas on your template, the lightest shades of blue and red combined with white text are almost unreadable.
The extra "classification" column also seems unnecessary to me, as the seats are already sorted by margin -- just wastes space for no real reason, in comparison with the (in my view better) approach of the previous table in simply dividing each seat into marginal, fairly safe, etc sections. Again, my main question here is -- why does the current template need fixing? To me, the colour intensity isn't an issue, and I don't see why the table needs to be sortable, given the main purpose of an election pendulum is to identify the margins of seats, and it already sorts seats by margin. LivelyRatification (talk) 23:01, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
@LivelyRatification: I want to first by saying I am only trying to contribute and help out here. I really appreciate your feedback, and want to emphasise that I am still new to editing on Wikipedia and trying to learn the best practices of what is accessible or not and avoiding reversions. Happy to agree with your thoughts on this but I might be misinterpreting your tone over text online which I do find hard to quite a bit regularly. APNOneTwo (talk) 02:58, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
I have asked a question on Talk:Kay Elson on whether anyone knows, if and when Elson had contested a Queensland state election as a Nationals candidate (according to a journal). Marcnut1996 (talk) 22:57, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
Categories Organisation
Hi,
Are we able to organize the categories a bit better. Perhaps Separating Politics and Government.
The Candidates of the 2023 New South Wales state election draft was resubmitted for review in September but has not been reviewed since that time. Since its submission was declined in September, the page has been significantly improved and the election is now only a few short months away. Please feel free to make further improvements or to respond to the resubmission if you are able to do so. Thanks so much. -DilatoryRevolution (talk) 03:05, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
Personally I think the article should be moved instead of making a new one. Similar to how the Tasmanian state electorate of Clark and Denison are the same page (and they are also multi-member electorates). Marcnut1996 (talk) 10:42, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
I have gone ahead and moved the page for now, in order to create the wikilink for the new North Eastern region. This is to allow any elector searching up about the new region on Wikipedia to be able to find and read up on some context and electoral history. If this discussion resolves in having a separate page, then we can do that when the time comes. Marcnut1996 (talk) 03:21, 9 November 2022 (UTC)
I just noticed that our article on Bill D'Arcy (former Qld Labor MP and convicted sex offender) was a POV quagmire of massive proportions and reverted it back a few years to find somewhere to even start. It seems that some years back, it got a rewrite from someone with some very strong views that his (still-upheld) criminal conviction was unjust, other people tried to salvage it but weren't thorough enough, and it's gone to and fro at times ever since without ever really cleaning up the original mess in full. This could really use some eyes on it (and even better if someone is feeling like doing a more thorough cleanup than my just reverting the article back a few years). The Drover's Wife (talk) 08:22, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
I think an interactive map could be quite useful. Honestly any map improvements would be nice, it is currently quite difficult to figure out where the districts cover, so improvement I think would be widely appreciated. Dauwenkust (talk) 05:57, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
I proposed a merge of First McGowan Ministry and Second McGowan Ministry but that didn't get much participation and ended in no consensus. I think there needs to be a wider discussion of this inconsistency and something needs to be worked out. I don't really mind which way consensus falls, but I want there to be consistency, at least within each state, but preferably across all the states and territories.
I think this arose for two reasons: a) the states are completely inconsistent about how they record their own ministries in this way, and b) different people did different states according to their own preferences (and then people with different preferences have updated them!), and there isn't really any clear/objective best way to do it. As an example of the challenges in trying to sort this out based on official sources, our South Australia and Northern Territory articles don't separate the ministries for completely different reasons - SA because the parliament doesn't separate them at all, and NT because the parliament uniquely officially separates them every single time there's a reshuffle, and I felt that that led to a ridiculous amount of tiny articles on our end and merged them.
IMO, the all-in-one approach really doesn't work for any Premiers who held office for a long time (especially in the modern era as the number of portfolios has grown). (Bracks Ministry, which is an incomprehensible mess, is a perfect example of this done particularly badly.) As such, I don't think the all-in-one approach works for more than one-term governments - because the longer articles need to be split, and if they're going to be split in any consistent way it's going to affect most multi-term governments.
I don't have strong opinions about what to do otherwise, but I tend to think dividing them by parliament is probably the easiest way to have a consistent standard that's going to work in most cases. (The by-year NSW approach is still splitting them along these lines, but in a way that makes it much less clear that that's what they're doing.)
The Northern Territory is a problem for the by-parliament approach due to their eccentric dividing-ministries-each-reshuffle approach, which is why I merged their ministries into unseparated lists despite thinking it's generally a bad way of doing it. I was hesitant to adopt a system that would result in us numbering ministries in a wildly different way (and having a wildly different number of ministries) from that used by the parliament. It's a good example of the sorts of problems Wikipedia has had trying to do this consistently, and if anyone's got any better ideas I'm keen to hear them.
The capitalisation seems to be a case of which states got hit by the anti-capitalisation brigade and which didn't. I agree they should be standardised and don't care which we go with. Also agreed about standardising the NSW names, which seems a fairly straightforward fix unless whoever did the date titling is still around and has strong opinions. The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:12, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Regarding capitalisation, all capital M ones are the wrong format that has not been moved to the lower case, see Talk:Gillard government#Ministry. All newer articles have been correctly transitioned to the lower case. And regarding New South Wales, the NSW parliament classifies different ministries with a ministry number and therefore each ministry shown should have an article individually, which explains why First Perrottet ministry is only two months old and separate to the current Second Perrottet ministry. Marcnut1996 (talk) 10:36, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
The problem with absolute reliance on parliaments for this is that their inconsistent approaches mean that our approaches are inconsistent, when as one organisation it's not unreasonable for people to expect Wikipedia to have vaguely consistent handling across Australia. I also can't really work out what NSW's approach even is: it seems it divides by Premier (for Labor Premiers), Premier or Deputy Premier (for LNP Premiers), and then there's a couple random cases that don't fit with that (not separating when Troy Grant became DP, separating the Perrotet-Toole ministry for no obvious reason). Following the parliaments isn't the worst approach (it is how we got here, after all), but Steelkamp has a point and if it's possible to work out a more consistent approach I think our coverage of this area would benefit. The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I think the Perrottet-Toole ministry was split in two because a good majority of the ministers had their portfolios changed when they were sworn in in December 2021, similar to a post-election reshuffle; whereas where a deputy premier (i.e Nationals leader) was changed, only the Nationals portfolios reshuffled and not majority of the cabinet. Marcnut1996 (talk) 11:34, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
If nobody objects, I will move the NSW articles over to the first, second, third, etc title format tomorrow. It seems like the other issues require further thought though, so I will leave them for now. Steelkamp (talk) 09:34, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Colours in parliamentary member lists
I noticed that almost all of the NSW legislative council lists had a colour bar next to the party membership of each member, which I found really useful for looking at the lists. I was thinking of moving some of this formatting into the other other state member lists, and started on WA. Is this something that people would find useful and is there anyone else keen to working through the lists, or is it better to leave them as is, as I got reverted pretty quickly on this project. Dauwenkust (talk) 07:10, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Welcome! The colours look great and much better than the table without colours. I wouldn't have thought it would be a controversial change to be honest! Did the person reverting give a reason why they thought not having colours is better? Cjhard (talk) 07:22, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm not too fussed either way as long as it's consistent (particularly within a series of lists) and isn't just a few random lists changed to a different format willy-nilly. That said, the NSW approach as applied to party-changing MPs looks dreadful (with the random colour boxes on the other side of the party box) - does anyone have any better ideas for handling that? The Drover's Wife (talk) 10:55, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Yeah I am not a fan of that approach, but I am still fairly new with formatting, so I am not really sure of a better way of doing it though, also open for suggestions! As long as I keep working down the list to try to standardise all of them, am I okay to restore the WA ones I had already done? Dauwenkust (talk) 23:54, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
In terms of the WA list (1) I would suggest using {{sortname}} for the members names so that they sort by surname not first name (2) it should not contain "Hon" "Dr" per MOS:HON. Having gone through all of the NSW lists, it's a tedious process, but if you're up for it, good luck. Find bruce (talk) 07:03, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree with the need for consistency and that if one of those pages changes, they all have to change as well. How about something such as the following for members who changed parties:
Could it be addressed by putting (until X date; from Y date) in the party column? It looks like there's room without it being too ugly. This is the problem with these kinds of formatting changes though - it's very easy to go "ooh it should look nice with colours!", not think through things like party-switchers, and wind up with a dogs breakfast that's really fiddly to solve. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:27, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
Australian Senate committees has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Steelkamp (talk) 09:33, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
There's a discussion regarding whether Tania Mihailuk should be considered a One Nation MLA or an independent MLA contesting the upper house for One Nation on the linked talk page. The outcome will also have implications for how George Christensen is classified. This discussion may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. J2m5 (talk) 04:04, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
Quality assessments are used by Wikipedia editors to rate the quality of articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.
No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.
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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
For mine, I think they should mostly be listed in their parties if they've registered them. Pocock is a special case because he has openly acknowledged that the party registration was merely a means to appear above the line, and he is listed by the parliament website as an independent. I suspect Kim for Canberra would have done the same had she been elected, despite her party still being registered as of today. In these cases, it's clearly best practice to list them as independents unless in specific technical discussions of party registration etc. Cases such as Le's, however, are different—her party has been registered with the intention of running multiple candidates in elections. In that sense, it isn't any different from the JLN or PHON. I would be very surprised if the parliament website didn't update her listing to the new party soon/when it is officially registered. Similarly, it lists Lazarus' party as the GLT. In cases such as these, I think we should be separating them, as both the politicians themselves and parliament's official listings have done. Jjamesryan (talk | contribs) 16:00, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't know that the answer is necessarily that simple. For example, the UAP were deregistered last year, and yet parliament is happy to list Babet as a UAP member (and so are we) because he continues to identify himself as one. Jjamesryan (talk | contribs) 00:07, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
My basic premise, is that how individuals describe themselves in official biographic material, like the profiles on the Australian Parliament website [12] should be treated as the authoritative truth.
As such the 'independent parties' should be treated as independents.
As a general rule of thumb, I would propose that self styled parties shouldn't be treated as parties, until they have at least 2 notable candidates. Until then, any party related content can just go on the page of the titular individual. Micmicm (talk) 13:12, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
I think even at least 2 notable members will do, like Frank Carbone and Dai Le, both notable members (and founders) of their new party. Besides they intend to field candidates in Western Sydney (which definitely makes it function like a party), it's just awaiting AEC registration that's all. Marcnut1996 (talk) 23:11, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
In what seems to have flown under the radar, the article names for the state and territory branches of the Australian Labor Party, Liberal Party of Australia and National Party of Australia. This started with a discussion to change Australian Labor Party (Victorian Branch) to Victorian Labor Party. That discussion was quickly expanded to all state and territory Labor parties, then to most state and territory Liberal parties and National parties. A very small discussion was held on the talk page of Liberal Party of Australia (New South Wales Division) to change the names for seven Liberal parties' articles, and similar for the Nationals'.
The article names for these parties have been a potential issue for some time, and they should be discussed in a central location of high visibility with as much participation as possible. I have reverted the name changes for the Liberal parties but I have left those for the Labor and National parties alone for now. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:02, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
Australian Labor Party (Australian Capital Territory Branch)
Australian Labor Party (Australian Capital Territory)
Australian Capital Territory Labor Party
Australian Capital Territory Labor
Australian Labor Party (Northern Territory Branch)
Australian Labor Party (Northern Territory)
Northern Territory Labor Party
Northern Territory Labor
Liberal Party of Australia (New South Wales Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (New South Wales)
New South Wales Liberal Party
New South Wales Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (Victoria Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Victoria)
Victorian Liberal Party
Victorian Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (Queensland Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Queensland)
Queensland Liberal Party
Queensland Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (Western Australia Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Western Australia)
Western Australian Liberal Party
Western Australian Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (South Australia Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (South Australia)
South Australian Liberal Party
South Australian Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (Tasmania Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Tasmania)
Tasmanian Liberal Party
Tasmanian Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (A.C.T. Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Australian Capital Territory)
Australian Capital Territory Liberal Party
Australian Capital Territory Liberals
Liberal Party of Australia (Northern Territory Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Northern Territory)
Northern Territory Liberal Party
Northern Territory Liberals
National Party of Australia – NSW
National Party of Australia (New South Wales)
New South Wales National Party
New South Wales Nationals
National Party of Australia – Victoria
National Party of Australia (Victoria)
Victorian National Party
Victorian Nationals
National Party of Australia – Queensland
National Party of Australia (Queensland)
Queensland National Party
Queensland Nationals
National Party of Australia – (WA)
National Party of Australia (Western Australia)
Western Australian National Party
Western Australian Nationals
National Party of Australia – (SA)
National Party of Australia (South Australia)
South Australian National Party
South Australian Nationals
National Party of Australia – Tasmania
National Party of Australia (Tasmania)
Tasmanian National Party
Tasmanian Nationals
I am opening the discussion here for the names of the articles about the state and territory branches/divisions of the Australian Labor Party, Liberal Party of Australia and National Party of Australia. There are a few different formats that can be used, with consideration for a single format. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:45, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
There was no need to revert these page moves. The moves for the Liberal Party branches came naturally after an in-depth discussion over at the Victorian Labor Party talk page. A complex discussion was not required as it was already had, even if it was for a separate party. This included the consideration of everything you're proposing here, especially concerning whether to include 'Party' at the end of each title.
I appreciate that you're concerned about policy violations but there's absolutely no point in retreading the same ground. If you disagree with the new titles, you should have simply initiated a move request. Loytra (talk) 12:17, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
The wrong names are not being used for these articles. This is an even less valid reason for moving these pages back. Loytra (talk) 02:40, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps some members of this WikiProject could take a look at 2023 Warrandyte state by-election and may be help resolve the content dispute taking place over which candidates to include. I came across the article via discussion at WP:COIN#2023 Warrandyte state by-election and know nothing about Austrailian elections. I tried to revert back to the last stable version because of a host of formatting and syntax errors that were being introduced by one of the participants in the dispute, but the errors got subsequently re-added when my edited was reverted. Eventually, WP:3RR will come into play if things keep going as they are. — Marchjuly (talk) 06:10, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
Credibility bot
As this is a highly active WikiProject, I would like to introduce you to Credibility bot. This is a bot that makes it easier to track source usage across articles through automated reports and alerts. We piloted this approach at Wikipedia:Vaccine safety and we want to offer it to any subject area or domain. We need your support to demonstrate demand for this toolkit. If you have a desire for this functionality, or would like to leave other feedback, please endorse the tool or comment at WP:CREDBOT. Thanks! Harej (talk) 18:14, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
The website for the Parliament of Australia states that "With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and where otherwise noted, all material presented on this website is provided under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia licence." Does this not also include parliamentary portraits? Is there any reason why we cannot upload them to commons? Loytra (talk) 23:33, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
I agree. There are severe problems with these articles. I have been concerned with 2023 Western Australian local elections recently, from which I have deleted a bunch of material from. The article focuses too much on political parties, which are generally not involved with local government elections in Western Australia and don't generally endorse candidates. To imply the state premier, opposition leader and other party leaders are campaigning in local government elections is ridiculous. To imply the table of results for each councillor elected for each political party is exhaustive is ridiculous. Sources do not frame local government elections through the lenses of political parties. They are all about the individual candidates. Steelkamp (talk) 06:54, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
I strongly agree. I am particularly concerned with the arbitrary and unsourced nature of "leaders" of parties and giving the (incorrect) impression that councils in Australia are akin to, ie, the UK, in their emphasis on parties. J2m5 (talk) 01:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
That being said, I do think the articles have a place on Wikipedia, just not in their current format. The elections should be considered separately rather than as a whole. J2m5 (talk) 01:07, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
Re all - I'm more than happy to chuck on what's currently on the 2023 Western Australian local elections page infobox about "XXX is the XXX Party leader but not involved at a local level" etc, I have no problem with the leader bit being removed if that's the consensus.
However it's clear more broadly that parties are involved and some far more closely that others - the pre-1950s Vic local election pages I've managed to find results for clearly show a party endorsement, notably with the ALP. Most recent Vic elections in 2020 has multiple sources showing Labor endorsements in several LGA, plus Burwood Libs in three LGAs. Qld obviously has ALP/LNP endorsements in Brisbane, NSW has party endorsements throughout the entire state, etc, so to fully remove party references would be factually wrong.
Then there's the non-majors: Greens absolutely endorse and promote their candidates across Australia so it's appropriate to have their leaders there. Minor parties including the Vic Socialists, Sustainable Aus, Reason, Small Business, etc all have a closer involvement locally (including with their leaders who can also be councillors) so again, seems appropriate to list leaders and parties. Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 05:26, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
@Totallynotarandomalt69: I'm really not sure as to why the Greens endorsing and promoting candidates is in any way proximal to the supposed need to put a leader and a total councillor count in an infobox. The problem is that the "leader of the NSW Greens" for instance is totally irrelevant to the conduct of the Greens' council campaign for Shoalhaven City Council. Unlike UK politics, state and council elections bear zero reference to one another. To mention the "leader of the NSW Greens" in reference to the Greens' council campaigns is irrelevant. The same goes with the ALP and the Liberal Party. So would any "total councillors" count. When we are going through Hay Shire Council interests declarations to see if anyone's admitted to being a Nat, that's when we've gone too far with party-identifying council elections. J2m5 (talk) 14:08, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
There is just so much WP:OR everywhere at all times with the articles. I appreciate the need to cover council elections on Wikipedia but I think this has been approached in the wrong way.J2m5 (talk) 14:17, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Completely understand some of your points here:
1. I’m completely open to removing party leaders for Lib/Lab, it’s honestly not a big concern for me. However I’ll make the argument that Greens should stay - the Greens are far more open and involved in local government and in terms of leaders (noting they don’t have one in NSW) Samantha Ratnam was reasonably active in leading the push to elect Greens councillors in Vic 2020. Also - minor parties, especially those who may only have local representation like SusAus, should not have leaders removed and I don’t think that’s a controversial point
2. The addition of results pages is trying to make sure each council actually is shown individually (goes without saying they don’t have and should not have their own page) with specific results so it’s not lumped in with a state total - the main page I guess is more of a statistical thing with the important background info which again is pretty non-controversial (COVID delaying elections, changes to council structure, idk). Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 16:16, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Maybe in Melbourne, but in Newcastle while the Greens actively campaign and have got councillors elected, there is no visibility at all of the NSW leadership. It's misleading to include any state leaders in the infobox. Newystats (talk) 21:56, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Having seen several of these articles (most familiar with Tasmania) I think the articles need massive surgery, or failing that deletion. The problem is the "party" section which has been used, in general if not always unsourced, to cover a wide range of party associations and party-like concepts thrown in together as if they are the same thing when they're not. These include at least the following six types:
1. formal endorsements by party (mostly Greens),
2. candidates known to be members of a party but not formally endorsed by the party,
3. candidates who have been covered as having a claimed connection to a party but are not known to be members,
4. candidates who had party associations in the past but no longer have those associations,
5. promotional tickets/teams of convenience that are created to run for particular elections and elect members but usually have no lasting existence beyond the election they run at
6. non-party local networks (teal groups etc)
It is more misleading than useful to capture all of these under the same heading "Party", especially when some are wrong (eg Tony Mulder is not an Independent Liberal anymore; he was suspended/expelled (sources vary) from the party in 2018 and no longer associates with it). Also these categories overlap, eg it is common to see tickets of convenience that include known members of, or recent state candidates for, political parties.
From the list of cases above, I think it's OK to include type 1 as "party" where the endorsement is publicly verifiable (media release, party website for instance) and the endorsement should be sourced. Type 2 might be worth covering but needs to be distinguished from type 1 in some way to indicate the candidate is not known to be formally endorsed, and sourced to a WP:RS in every specific case. Types 3 and 4 are footnote material perhaps, but even then only if sourced. If Types 5 and 6 are to be covered at all these cases should be explicitly distinguished from parties and sourced.
Declaring parties for local government is a problem because unlike state and federal elections where party endorsements are stated in official ballot material, in local government they're often not and therefore covering party alignments reliably is a lot of work. Declaring candidates to be independents is a problem for the same reason. Unless the issues can be solved quickly it would be better to delete all reference to parties. Therealsleepycat (talk) 21:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
I don’t want to make this about me let alone the articles but let me go through those in terms of where I’ve put in a party link when editing:
1. Yes, no disagreement
2. See IndLib/IndLab/IndNat
3. Unless there’s a really good source? Not put in
4. Not put in
5/6. Always sourced and given they operate with branding and technically endorsements it’s a useful guide - again, always sourced
The sources are always there and I have worked tirelessly to ensure they are on all articles, like anyone on this website. Take into account it’s NYE lol but if there’s an error like Muldee then yeah, remove it, it’s just an error. Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 22:40, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
So for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2022_Tasmanian_local_elections, I am not aware of any of the shown Labor or Liberal or ON candidates there being endorsed by their parties, so they generally all (if confirmed as members by a reliable and stated source) are cat 2 and should be changed to Independent (insert party here) with a link to a source confirming them as a member of a party. Ditto the Liberals listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Hobart - one wasn't a Liberal at all at the time of the election, the others weren't (to my knowledge) endorsed by the party for the 2022 election (there was a very low key supporter email endorsement of several Hobart Liberals in 2018). Concerning sources I cannot see any source cited on either of those pages that verifies that any of the candidates listed have any of the affiliations stated (apart from if one digs through the candidate statements to find the Greens) - the sources may exist but sources need to be cited individually. A good example of a tricky one is Jarrod Boys who appears on the Burnie list to be the same as any other "Liberal" listed, but in fact ceased to be a Liberal at some time before nominations closed (https://www.examiner.com.au/story/7820500/tasmanian-liberal-party-quiet-on-former-proud-boys-volunteer-state-director-calls-matter-closed/). In the absence of a source the reader has no idea whether the editor was aware of that, was relying on an earlier source that is now out of date, was aware of it and found a different source that contradicted it (etc). Therealsleepycat (talk) 03:03, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Yep that's absolutely more than fair and I appreciate the correction! I'll change them to cat 2
In terms of sources I think we might both agree that it would look very ugly if the citation was directly next to the name in the infobox but they'll be at the top (eg where it says "2022 Tasmanian local elections: Flinders") Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 03:24, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
I really think these are pretty valuable articles that shouldn't be removed. A solid 90% of them tend to be completely factual, and I reckon its not worth deleting these articles because of that 10%. These articles seemingly contain the only catalogue of this sort that mentions party members in councils that aren't endorsed. I do agree the leaders section should be removed, but nothing else should be changed (other than corrections of course). Alot of very valuable information would be lost to time if the pages were to be deleted. AmNowEurovision (talk) 07:32, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Some have "Department of XX", some have "XX Department". (The only case where the latter form would be correct is Attorney-General's Department, but that category doesn't exist yet.)
Some have "Australian ...", but one has "... of Australia".
One doesn't specify the country at all.
It's a classic mishmash.
We need to settle on a common naming convention. I'm not too fussed what that might be, but my suggestion, FWIW, would be:
Preselection article appropriateness for Wikipedia
Could we have a discussion about the appropriateness of an article about Liberal preselections as 2023–24 Liberal Party of Australia preselections currently exists in the mainspace. Where only spotty reporting about this occurs and no official primary data can be ascertained from returning officers, I'm not sure if we should be using the election box template as if presenting this data as certain fact. Not to mention that not all contests are reported on by the press. J2m5 (talk) 05:44, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
The current article also has factually incorrect information, such as labelling Alex Hawke a "moderate" and various others "unaligned" where this would come under WP:OR. Getting "factions" reliably would pose serious WP:OR issues if this article concept was expanded. J2m5 (talk) 05:47, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Hi all,
I've bitten the bullet and made a page for the Stage three tax cuts. Attempting to summarise all that has been written about them is an absolute monster of a task, and any contributions you can make to assist are extremely welcome. Thank you very much! GraziePrego (talk) 04:53, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
State government articles
Hi all,
I was wanting to add some information about events currently taking place in state politics, but then realised there's no appropriate page to put them. In federal politics, we have the Albanese government article to list day-to-day events that concern the government, but there is no equivalent timeline for state and territory governments. Is it appropriate for me to make, for example, Allan state government or Minns state government? GraziePrego (talk) 04:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Typically I would have thought they would just go on the page of the relevant individual/s (which are often pretty short on detail on what has happened during their term - see Jacinta Allan's article for example). ITBF (talk) 05:15, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
That's true- it does make it tricky to include some things though. If something happens that concerns the entire state government as a whole, rather than just the premier, it might be considered a bit irrelevant to include on specifically just the premier's article. GraziePrego (talk) 05:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
Rann government is the only such article I know about. I do think this sort of article is viable in general and I support the creation of other such articles. The sources are certainly there. Steelkamp (talk) 05:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I'm wondering if there's any set standard for state by-elections not having articles? Specifically in Victoria, I made a couple pages which have been undone (eg 1915 Bendigo East state by-election).
A lot of old Victorian state by-elections don't have pages or even any results (I think they should) and the user who has undone some of this commented "note that if [the results are] (almost) the content of the entire new page, that suggests the new page isn't needed".
NSW seems to have every single one if its by-elections, even in the pre-party era, with pages, and Queensland has a bunch as well - including ones almost entirely made up of the results, like 1905 Ashfield state by-election, 1912 Alexandria state by-election etc
TLDR - wondering if there's a set standard/whether we should set a standard for creating these pages or not? Just before I go ahead and make more of them Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 21:04, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
I agree they (state by-elections) should all have articles and I have created plenty—there's no (or shouldn't be a) blanket notability ban on state-level by-elections, but I actually agree with the comment that if the article is just a results table (and maybe some other context such the date and reason for the election), it's probably better to just include those details in the list of results. Trove is a great resource for that era, and you should be able to find additional material around the campaign, the count, any other issues like objections raised or ineligible candidates, but if not, just redirect to the results list for the district and include the contextual detail there. --Canley (talk) 22:28, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
It was me merging the newly created 1915 Bendigo East state by-election back to Electoral results for the district of Bendigo East (my thanks to Totallynotarandomalt69 for starting a discussion here). Note that I'm not questioning the notability of a bielection if there is much to say about it. However, for the Bendigo 1915 page there doesn't seem to be, so I merged for short text and context. A sentence or two, plus a table, seems to work well in the election page. I certainly don't think that Victoria is a special case (COI: I was born in NSW ...); I note WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and I'd be very happy to see permastubs for other bielections merged to their relevant distict election pages too (even if they were in NSW). Klbrain (talk) 22:56, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
Yeah and that's more than fair enough, I can see why you've done that
Unfortunately more than a few of these pages never had the by-elections in the results - often because they are pre-1910 where no results seem to be on here - which is also sorta why I (and I hope some other people do it) are now fixing the electoral result pages to have embedded results and sub-headings for the specific year, not just decade Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 23:11, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
I noticed a number of infoboxes of MPs having shadow ministries removed today (such as this one). Newish in the category - but is this a convention? (Have asked that editor the same question, but figured I'd get more of a sense of what the consensus is here.) MatthewDalhousie (talk) 07:36, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I'm against inclusion of shadow minister offices in the infobox - it's cluttering and prone to confusion with when the same individuals become actual ministers. Oppoisition leaders and their deputies, whips and business managers are good to include in infoboxes though as they are disparate positions. J2m5 (talk) 03:49, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
It's not a hard and fast rule for me, but I think in most cases it just adds clutter as J2m5 stated. We have so many articles where the infobox is significantly longer than the article itself, and a lot of the time positions are added to the infobox without even being mentioned in the article prose. There is a lot of turnover in shadow minister roles and portfolio names, which means they get out of date quickly, and they are rarely of great significance in a politician's career (especially where the person has previously held actual ministerial posts). I would possibly make exceptions where the shadow portfolio is of clear significance (treasury, defence, foreign affairs) AND the person has not held any other more significant roles in their career. E.g., having Jim Chalmers' role as shadow treasurer in the infobox made sense to me. ITBF (talk) 04:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
@J2m5, @ITBF and @Tytrox - yep, this makes complete sense. A lot of info boxes are extremely long, and, in the political category, having a Minister's previous shadow roles compounds the problem. Would be good to have this as an agreed convention somewhere - any suggestions? MatthewDalhousie (talk) 04:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Yep J2m5 and ITBF basically covered my position. Summary of my input for Info box listing is: 1) Own wikipedia article; and/or 2) Significant notability beyond a listing in the "Shadow Ministry under Leader X" page (going hand in hand with point 1), and not just a footnote on the appointed government's ministry page; and 3) Appointment by Governor General where it applies. Beyond those conditions, no info box mention. You just have to look at Michaelia Cash's BLP to see why info boxes can get so ridiculously long, even with actual ministry positions when she was in government, and I made effort on articles such as hers to keep it reasonable length by adding collapsible boxes. -- Tytrox (talk) 06:41, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
An error seems to have crept into a few results page where we are calculating a "swing" between 2PP/2CP counts which feature different parties, e.g. at 2024 Cook by-election and 2018 Fremantle by-election. LIB v ALP and LIB v GRN (for example) are two different metrics, so a swing between them does not make statistical sense. If 60% of people preferred apples to oranges last year, but 70% of people preferred apples to bananas this year, that doesn't mean apples have increased in popularity by 10%. I note the official AEC results pages (here and here for the examples previously mentioned) do not calculate a swing in these instances. I have been reverted a couple of times in fixing this so want to establish consensus here before making any further changes. ITBF (talk) 07:02, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
This makes complete sense. Only makes sense to declare a swing if the two contenders are from parties which were the main two contenders last time around. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 01:01, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Peter Cain (politician)
Opponents are currently using Peter Cain (politician) to add dirt with a new "Controversy" section that occupies half the article (added 18 April 2024). I know nothing about the topic and am hoping people here will work out whether the material is WP:DUE and has WP:RS. I noticed this at AN. Johnuniq (talk) 02:43, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I think we can agree that RiotAct is not an especially reliable source for an encyclopaedia, though all the Canberra Times sources are okay. There's also an issue with using primary documents (statements from the ACT government, rather than from a a news source). But the real problem is, as you say @Johnuniq, the ridiculous weight put on controversies. They don't even merit their own section, no more than a mention in my view, especially as these are simply accusations from those on the opposite benches. No investigative journalist has established any of it. Needs a solid trim. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 03:07, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
2024 Dunkley by-election gives the swing as -3.57 for Labor and +3.57 for the Liberals. Not being familiar with the term, I consulted Swing (Australian politics) and was left confused — none of this appears to be relevant. (Eventually I found the 2022 election results from the AEC and discovered that the Liberals' two-party-preferred result was 3.57% higher than in 2022, and the reverse for Labor.) Does the Swing (Australian politics) article cover this topic at all, in a way that I didn't understand? If I'm understanding correctly, the Dunkley by-election article uses it to mean merely "change in these parties' TPP results from the previous election", and this meaning is absent from the Swing article. Nyttend (talk) 20:47, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I would much appreciate it if anyone who is more in the habit of writing content about politics than me could look over the section City of Brisbane#Wards which contains the results of the recent 2024 Brisbane City Council election. I stumbled onto it this afternoon and it was in a mess. Names of the elected people were in the article but supported by citations from 2020, parties and the colours didn't match, counts of members of parties were wrong, etc. I find it was too much of a mess to just walk away, so I did my best to clean it up, but it involves use of tables and the diagrams that I am not familiar with, so I hope I have brought it up to date, but would welcome a second set of eyes. I don't know where to find the salary data, so I didn't touch that. Thanks if you can help! Free free to change anything I got wrong! Kerry (talk) 07:35, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
Just one comment. There are 26 councillors and 1 mayor, so the total adds up to 27. That had me confused for a while. Kerry (talk) 07:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
Have rebuilt the intro to that section. Hope it flows a little better now.
Photos of election campaign posters apparently in breach of Commons Wikimedia?
Some photos of election campagin posters I have taken over the past year has been deleted or nominated to be deleted because "Similar to UK, no freedom of panorama for "graphic works" in Australia". Just want to know everyone's thoughts on this.
The deleting of campaign posters really bothers me, given that this category of image is created to be seen, used and shared in the public domain. But we'll need to find a solid argument. MatthewDalhousie (talk) 12:00, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
So, in my opinion, the table with First Preference Percentage and the Two Candidate Preferred percentage is pretty uninformative. Just from those numbers, you might be left scratching your head as to why the person leading on first preferences ends up losing. Sure you can *imply* that the Greens vote went to Labor, One Nation vote went to Liberal, etc, but there should be something more explicit.
With minor parties surging, outright wins on first preference (i.e. a candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote, rendering preferences meaningless) are becoming more and more rare, with 133/151 (87%) seats being won on first preferences in 2022, way up from only 63/147 (43%) in 1993.[1]
I was inspired to start making Sankey diagrams of Australian lower house seats (this wouldn't work in a visually coherent way in the Australian Senate because each state is effectively a multi member constituency) from an image from 2022 United States Senate election in Alaska (right). This image clearly shows that the Democrats overwhelmingly preferred Murkowski over Tshibaka and this got Murkowski over the 50% line.
I have made quite a few Sankey diagrams of various Australian seats here on Flourish. Would people support if I generated one for every seat (in a better format than Flourish, possibly Plotly or another custom designed one to best convey the information, the Alaska senate example is a good one) and added them to every seat page, with the data from the latest election, possibly via a bot since I'm not going to do it 151 times lol.
I'd be in support of that. It really is a useful diagram that shows in an instant exactly where the primary votes ended up in each count. It might get a bit complicated for seats with lots of candidates, but it's more of a rarity that seats get more than 10. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 06:53, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I think they're absolutely gorgeous graphs, and highly useful too. I would 100% support adding them to all seats you wish :) GraziePrego (talk) 08:40, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I have done a few Sankey diagrams of preference flows, particularly where the two-candidate outcome was different to the first preference leader, such as 2018 Braddon by-election. It should certainly be possible to do in an automated way—I have done it before as a Shiny app in R to download the AEC data and generate preference diagrams for each division at the 2019 federal election for a university assignment: https://metacoretechs.shinyapps.io/DataVisAssignment3/ . I'll see if I can put the code on Github. --Canley (talk) 13:10, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
Very interesting! That would be helpful if you could do that. I've been messing around in python and the AEC has the entire preference flow for every seat in one CSV (unlike victoria...), which is handy, you can simply wrangle that using any old code (python in my case) to convert it into a format for a sankey diagram. MarkiPoli (talk) 11:12, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Positioning of non-Latin-script names in biographies
Hi all. A fellow Australian contributor (@DeadlyRampage2) had a discussion with me today on page Talk:Fatima Payman regarding the exact placement of foreign-origin names not written in a Latin script. He objected to my usage of the "native_name" parameter of Template:Infobox officeholder for including the Persian name. He says that it is not conventional for articles included in WikiProject Australian politics to use that infobox parameter. Hence we agreed to move the name out of the infobox to the lead section.
Is this indeed a convention specific to Australia-related biographies? The "native_name" parameter is used quite widely across infoboxes on the site. After I concurred with his suggestion of moving Payman's secondary name out of the infobox, that fellow contributor has removed the parameter from infoboxes of other people (e.g. edits [1], [2]), claiming "consensus on Australian politician pages".
I have not been involved in Wikiproject Australia discussions (or with Australian editors in general) and would appreciate some insight. I am of the view that an indiscriminate pursuit of removing usages of the parameter could contribute to Wikipedia:Systemic bias along cultural lines, as such infoboxes illuminate significant cultural heritage and are also useful to certain multi-lingual readers like myself. I write here because there is clearly no site-wide rule. I'm curious about whether there has been prior discussion on this specific issue within Wikiproject Australia.
I would like to say that I reject it is a culture bias. Not only do I find that offensive as a multicultural Australian, but it also goes against Wikipedia rules as is required by Wikipedia:AGF which states that there is a required assumption among editors that another member is geniunely engaging in an edit in good faith. I would also ad that I have found 2 articles, of which you have mentioned above. 2, out of hundreds of Australian multicultural politicians, that are clearly in the minority as to whether script of another language is to be used in the infobox. It is commonplace for multicultural policians to have the script of their native language in the lead paragraph and not in the infobox, especially not both. In conclusion, I would also add that in many wikipedia infoboxes, a parameter can actually be added, however contain nothing in it, which is actually quite common, and this may skew the results of your research. Thanks DeadlyRampage26 (talk) 13:23, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
I sincerely apologise if you feel hurt by my formulation of the message. I want to say that I had no intention of disenfranchising you. I did not characterise your edits as "trolling" or "vandalism". I have consistently engaged with you via talk pages in a polite way. I hope you understand. Indeed my message here is too harsh in hindsight. I am sorry about that. Y. Dongchen (talk) 14:11, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
Its all good. Im just trying to get my point across that im not doing this in bad faith. I am simply following through with the same standards for most of the Australian politician pages by extending them to the few outliers. DeadlyRampage26 (talk) 14:13, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
Yes. Your many draft articles are commendable. I haven't and won't interfere with any of your removal of those Australian political figures' "native_name" from infoboxes until someone else can provide some guidance. It did indeed look like I was suggesting you're a overt racist. Sorry again about the formulation of the message. Y. Dongchen (talk) 14:34, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
Wondering if anyone here knows either how to resolve this/who to speak to, cause if this isn't fixed soon the efns may as well be removed and replaced with general dot points at the bottom instead Totallynotarandomalt69 (talk) 23:56, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
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Done Happy with how quickly the issue has been fixed. The template has been much adopted by editors here - a quick count showed nearly half of the 2,659 Articles with excerpts are Australian election results. Find bruce (talk) 09:59, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Premier of Victoria § Requested move 1 October 2023 2. Steelkamp (talk) 07:25, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
