With the news yesterday that the Albanese Government is looking at fixed, four-year terms (and then the news today that they’re not looking at them very hard), we’ve had a question:

How do fixed, four-year terms interact with the Australian Constitution’s quirks like the “staggered” Senate and double dissolution elections?

The short answer is that it would depend on how the constitutional amendment is drafted, but we know what earlier governments have proposed.

“Staggered” Senate terms

Each of Australia’s six states is represented by 12 senators, but you only elect 6 of them at an ordinary election. We have elections every three years (roughly) and each senator serves for six years, so at any given time only half the senators are facing re-election.

What happens if you go from three-year terms to four-year terms?

There’s two options:

Option 1. Get rid of staggered terms. Elect all 12 senators for a state at the same time, for the same four-year term.

Option 2. Keep staggered terms. Elect every senator for an eight-year term, but still only elect 6 at a time.  

Option 1 would mean the Senate becomes more proportional to the vote. Instead of needing about one-in-six votes to get elected, a senator would only need about one-in-twelve.

This is what already happens at a double dissolution election, like the 2016 election where a record number of minor party senators were elected.

Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what most people think about when they hear “four-year terms”.

Option 2 would mean senators serve for a long time. Australia in 2025 is very different to Australia in 2017, but your vote up to eight years earlier would decide who represented you.

When Bob Hawke had a referendum to introduce four-year terms in 1988, he went with Option 1.

If the House of Representatives and Senate fall out of sync, how do they get back in sync?

It used to be common that House of Representatives elections were held at a different time to Senate elections. That can happen because of how our Constitution is written.

For one thing, the Constitution is strict about senators serving roughly six-year terms, but allows the House of Representatives to go to an early election instead of seeing out the full three years.

For another, the way the Constitution says Senate terms must be backdated after a double dissolution election can mess things up.

The Prime Minister can sync up the two houses of Parliament by going to an early election. Bob Hawke had to do that in 1984, going to an election almost two years early to catch up to the Senate. But if terms are fixed, that’s not an option.

In practice, you could resolve this by amending the Constitution to say that senators serve for exactly two House of Representatives’ terms, however long or short they may be. 

Three earlier referendums tried to achieve this change; they failed each time. Bob Hawke’s referendum in 1988 instead would have set senators’ terms at exactly one House of Representatives’ term, again avoiding the problem.