A quick look at the federal referendums as told by graphs in percent states and electors for.
Wikipedia has an excellent section
on the Australian Referendums
with plenty of data. These graphs are built from there. The
Section 128 of the Australian Constitution
states (abbreviated);
This Constitution shall not be altered except in the following manner:--
The proposed law for the alteration thereof must be passed by an absolute majority of each House of the Parliament, ...
And if in a majority of the States a majority of the electors voting approve the proposed law, and if a majority of all the electors voting also approve the proposed law, it shall be presented to the Governor-General ...
This is sometimes called the triple majority requirement. An absolute majority in parliament, the states and electors. Which is fair enough in a federalist system where it is expected that state electors would be precious of state's rights.
One of the questions is, does this triple majority make the constitution too difficult to alter, and is this why the High Court has taken to altering constitutional practice outside of referendums; and why the federal government elicits signed agreeance from the states to allow the federal government to oversee what are state responsibilities rather than constitutionally required federal responsibilities.
% States
The referendum which allowed the territories to vote did not allow the territories to count toward a state majority in referendums. So throughout federal referendum history, four of six states must pass a referendum.
The columns marked in green were successful. Note that there were a lot that achieved three out of six states in the for column, but that was not sufficient enough for a majority.
% Electors
Since 1977 the territories count toward the national total for referendums.
The green columns note the successful referendums. An interesting pattern is that many of the referendums hovered just under the fifty percent mark and some over. There are relatively few referendums that had the popular vote and not the state majority, but many of them had high 40s support and no state majority.
What is obvious, is that the referendums which did pass into constitutional change were very popular.
The small number of Australian states can make the results for referendums seem wildly for or against, despite the pattern of the elector's voting to be predominantly be mildly for or mildly against. This makes constitutional change that sparks ambivalence in even a small minority difficult to pass.
These two graphs alone don't answer the question's posed earlier in the article, a closer examination of what the referendum's were, on what topics, and what they represented is needed. I will deal with that in another article.
cam
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
