cam: To take a software analogy: of I think of the British implementation of Westminster as a group of teenage kids having written spaghetti code in VB many years ago, and now it has many important transactions that it must perform, that it cant be updated and any change to the code is approached with fear for the whole system failing.

I dont understand why Australia seeks to establish the British political heritage. We have innovated far past Britain\'s achievements in political science. Even our states can look back at London and laugh at their pre-industrial structures and electoral technologies.

It is also ironic that we follow British politics and American foriegn policy, when the Americans were the great political scientists and the British Empire had better foriegn policy than the current American manner of power politics, which they play, and play hard.

I guess Britain will require a political leader that can say, lets rewrite it in python! But consensus will probably lead it to being written in perl or lisp.

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avocadia: Python?: Bah! Too bureacratic with all its white spacing. \'sides, Ruby (almost) does multiple inheritance.

adam: So?: Python\'s been almost doing multiple inheritance for years :)

adam: Caveat: That is of course the sentiment that prompted me to post. But I think it\'s worthwhile noting that in this case the mechanism has been refactored over time until it is nearly equivalent to a resignation process written from scratch, as it were. Eg on the wikipedia page it described an incident where 15 Ulster Unionist MPs resigned at once. To deal with the resource limitation of only two crown appointments they queued the MPs so technically each held the position for an hour or so.

It does have rather a silly name though.

cam: Holding the position: for an hour or so? Kind of requires a baton to formalise the process, they could hand it on over a 400m section of pavement.

Obviously they have dealt with a niche condition in their system in a manner that works. But often work-arounds like that end up being absurd and speaks to deeper flaws in the system.

Is it a case of conservatism or simply not wanting to muck with it?

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adam: Small-c conservatism: I\'d say it\'s small-c conservatism, ie not wanting to muck with it.

avocadia: Whitespace!: froth

cam: Similar experience to Australia: convention is only legislated over once someone breaks it, and it leaves a lasting scar - like the dismissal when Lewis and Bjelke-Peterson went against convention and appointed Senators that were not from the party that vacated the Senate.

This produced a referendum question two years later; Senate Casual Vacancies . It does put parties in the constitution;

Where a vacancy has at any time occurred in the place of a senator chosen by the people of a State and, at the time when he was so chosen, he was publicly recognised by a particular political party as being an endorsed candidate, a person chosen or appointed under this section in consequence of that vacancy, or in consequence of that vacancy and a subsequent vacancy or vacancies, shall, unless there is no member of that party available to be chosen or appointed, be a member of that party.

Where;

(a) in accordance with the last preceding paragraph, a member of a particular political party is chosen or appointed to hold the place of a senator whose place had become vacant; and
(b) before taking his seat he cease to be a member of that party (otherwise than by reason of the party having ceased to exist),

Is it preferable to have former members rotate through a faux position requiring retirement, or to have political parties entrenched in the constitution in order to avoid the race condition that is the reserve powers in the Australian constitution?

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cam: A python developer commenting on java: \"I never understood why java developers liked typing so much?\"

I think notepad that comes with windows can handle python indenting. I think that is its default setting.

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cam: One of the cool things about congress: is that there are groups which collect and collate how Congressional representatives have voted. I have often wished for something similar in Australia to see how the Senators and Representatives back up their grand speeches. I know it is a meaningless exercise with the Labor Party, but even so.

The party-machine is an odd one, as much as I decry partisan politics, the best check and balance Australia has had recently was a split from the Liberal Party whose slogan was pure check and balances - \"Keep the bastards honest.\" The Liberal Party didn\'t provide the party-machine for the Australian Democrats though. That came from the New Liberals, the Centre-line party and the Australian Party.

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