Talk:Australian Senate

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Requested move 18 July 2020[edit]

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 (non-admin closure) Sam-2727 (talk) 04:01, 27 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Australian Senate → Senate (Australia) – I believe this article should be moved to Senate (Australia) to bring it inline with other legislature article titles (House of Representatives (Australia), Senate (Belgium), Senate (France), Senate (Netherlands) etc). The Senate is also called, well, the Senate, not the Australian Senate as per the Australian Parliament House website and the Senate policies and procedures document); this relates to the official name policy. The term Senate is also searched 12x as often as Australian Senate in Australia (Google Trends), as per common name policy. ItsPugle (talk) 06:38, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hey! I think the Senate's Twitter account goes under the flag of Australian Senate since there is no other highly visible way to distinguish it from other Senate accounts (United States, etc) in search. As I mentioned, all reference to the Senate on the Parliament of Australia website purely says "Senate" (For example: Senate page, About the Senate, Parliamentary Education Office page on the Senate). And with the search on Australian government websites, the term "Australian Senate" seems to be in reference to Odgers' Australian Senate Practice, which uses "Australian" to make it obvious that the policy is for Australia: inside the actual document, the Senate is exclusively referred to as "the Senate". The same is true for all the references on the first page of the Google results; they are using "Australian" as a regional indicator, not as the actual name of the chamber. ItsPugle (talk) 04:47, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hey, that seems fair -- unlike in a lot of countries (where, for example, the official logo or seal includes the country name) Australia does seem to go out of its way to call it the Senate as an official name without modifiers, including in the constitution. I'm going to change to neutral.--Yaksar (let's chat) 21:50, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hey! Thanks for sharing that. I don't believe that natural disambiguation is necessarily appropriate here or is the best option. A quick review of the top three freely available scholarly sources from a Google Scholar search for the term "Australian Senate" shows that all three use the term "Australian Senate" once in the introduction as a regional indicator, but from then on referred to as exclusively the "Senate" (ignoring the Semantic Scholar PDF, it seems to just be a data dump). One of these is purely from Australia (University of Western Australia's Department of the Senate), one from a joint project between the University of Manchester (UK) and the Australian National University published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, and the other from an ANU professor presenting at a roundtable in Canada - pretty much as reliable as they go. The natural disambiguation guidance says that for natural disambiguation to be used, reliable sources must commonly call the article subject by such name - for these reliable scholarly sources, "Senate" is the term used, not "Australian Senate", hence making "Australian Senate" actually in contravention of the policy. Obviously the second option, a comma-seperated distinction is not particularly relevant here, defaulting to the bracketed (parenthetical) disambiguation option. ItsPugle (talk) 04:47, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that the scholarly sources that you are citing use the term "Australian Senate" as a natural disambiguator is just more proof that we should be doing the same thing in this article. Rreagan007 (talk) 07:40, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hey! Thanks for bringing up those. As you mentioned, the last discussion for moving the article that I could find took place way back in early 2013 on a WikiProject Australia project page and didn't attract much actual discussion or any policy mentions, so I'm going to effectively disregard that discussion for the purposes of this. The person who actually moved House of Representatives (Australia) to its current title is also a well seasoned administrator, so I default to their reasoning and judgement. On the topic of natural disambiguation, I've also just replied to the above message from Rreagan007 with a bit of an analysis of the actual policy, so that may be of interest. In terms of the Senate (Australia) being awkward, I don't really think it is. In speech we might say "Australian Senate" (if it's unclear about the country, otherwise we'd just say "Senate"), but it's not normal English to say, "Senate Australia". That doesn't mean that Senate (Australia) is incorrect, it just isn't the same construction when written out as when spoken. ItsPugle (talk) 04:47, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, the administrator who moved the page was responding to a technical move request, not making the decision themselves. Even so, the fact that there had been prior discussion (however long ago) - in fact a direct objection and reversal of the move being proposed - meant that the move was clearly potentially controversial per WP:RM#CM, and so the technical move request was improper: it should not have been made and the admin should not have implemented it (this was almost certainly an oversight on behalf of both the admin and the move requester rather than any bad faith move). If this move request is unsuccessful, I hope the closing admin will also reverse the HoR move; if not, I'm sure a corresponding move request will follow. (As an aside, the fact that technical move requests do not involve any kind of notification on the page itself seems like a problem and the reason this kind of thing happens.)
I am not sure I can quite agree with your analysis of the sources, either. It is natural enough to refer to it as the "Senate" outside an introduction, in much the same way that a scholarly analysis of a person might refer to them primarily by their surname - or, indeed, an analysis of the Parliament of Australia would not refer to it as such outside the introduction, but simply as Parliament. This is obviously a difficult thing to judge purely on Google Scholar hits, but to me your link above clearly supports this article falling under natural disambiguation.
(Courtesy ping for @Anthony Appleyard: and @Wipur: as the administrator and move requester, given their actions are being discussed and they may wish to contribute to this discussion.) Frickeg (talk) 06:01, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I trust the administrator's judgement here, and am sure that they would not have made the move if it wasn't appropriate to do so (but I guess that's also my bias considering I'm proposing such move here). But yes, I do agree that the move was not non-controversial and a technical move was not quite the right avenue in that instance. On the analysis of sources, if the Senate were formally and officially called the "Australian Senate", an academic source such as the Australian Journal of Political Science would have referred to it as such. It's the same basis here on Wikipedia that you can see it on a lot of articles: on the Australian Labor Party article, for example, the party is also distinguished as being simply called Labor to which its referred to later on. Since this sort of 'other name' distinction isn't made in the scholarly reliable sources, it's only logical to assume that "Senate" is the formal name for the chamber, not "Australian Senate" - and again, this is shown on the Parliament of Australia and Parliamentary Education Office websites. ItsPugle (talk) 07:35, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Australian Journal of Political Science literally uses the term "Australian Senate" in the title, just like we do. No one is disputing that the formal name is "Senate", but that needs disambiguation and "Australian Senate" is a better and more natural way to do that, and one amply supported by the sources you yourself have provided. The ALP comparison is hardly valid - an encyclopedia article and a journal article are written in different styles. You won't find many journals saying "the Australian Labor Party, commonly called Labor" either (and frankly I find that intro a little fussy for us, but that's neither here nor there). Frickeg (talk) 09:53, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If you're suggesting that providing other commonly used names isn't encyclopedia, I would suggest giving alternate names section of the MOS a quick read over. But I am starting to see a bit more about your point (sorry that it's taking me so long, I'm not exactly having the best time right now). What about Senate of Australia instead of Australian Senate? To me, Australian Senate just seems completely out of place and whacky, especially in the context of other Senate articles; they either use Senate (Country) or Senate of Country. In fact, this is the first time I've ever seen the disambiguating qualifier come before the subject of the article, making it really hard to predict where the article actually is (which is a problem when trying to cross link in articles, especially for editors not active in this article). ItsPugle (talk) 10:27, 19 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I really do appreciate your efforts towards consensus here, but the simple fact is that "Australian Senate" is the more usual term, certainly more than "Senate of Australia" which would be almost an original construction. See for example [1], [2], [3], all formal publications of the Senate itself. Frickeg (talk) 21:32, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No. As is demonstrated above, the House of Reps article was moved improperly - which I assume was by accident rather than design. This is your chance to rectify that and make a proper argument for it. Frickeg (talk) 21:32, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Parliament of X" but "X Chamber" is the usual formulation in Australia, applying across the state parliaments as well (e.g. Parliament of New South Wales, New South Wales Legislative Assembly) with the rather controversial exception of Queensland. Frickeg (talk) 21:16, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Adjust senate member numbers per Sam McMahon resignation from party[edit]

Sam McMahon her resignation from the Country Liberal Party, which ends her association with the coalition, effectively becoming IND. It's not yet known if she'll be joining any other party prior to election. Can someone please help properly adjust the article to reflect this? 119.18.0.9 (talk) 21:17, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Babet and UAP deregistration[edit]

Babet has not become an independent. Recognition of party membership is determined by the Senate separately from the party registration system and the fact that the UAP is now unregistered does not make him an independent unless the Senate later recognises him as such. He remains a UAP Senator for the time being because generally the Senate accepts people as members of parties who they say they are members of, eg see Practice here: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/Odgers_Australian_Senate_Practice/Chapter_06 (Likewise the Senate accepts Pocock as an independent although he is the Senator relied upon for registration of the David Pocock party.) I would edit the sidebar to return him to UAP but I couldn't see how. One of the media reports that said he had become an independent was later edited to correct the error. Therealsleepycat (talk) 12:29, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Australian_Senate&oldid=1219204313"