Talk:1903 Australian federal election

message: Okay, people we need to work together to fix this article. Right now we have the Timeshift9 results added on the top of the page then directly below that we have another set of results that contradicts the results above. I beileve the problem may been that we used different sources, because I used Adam Carr's website in finding my figures and Timeshift used the University of WA website. We need to work to find a solution to this problem as soon as possible. Aussie King Pin 09:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would think a university would be more likely to have correct results than Adam Carr, however i'm more than happy to be corrected and any suggestions to fix this are welcome. Timeshift 09:42, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually on a second look the source for the UWA guide seems to be the ANU which I would regards as a better resource than Adam Carr as well. So I'm going to remove my figures but I still don't think the chart we have looks very good. Aussie King Pin 01:16, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Conflicting results

message: Another is deciding that pre-1912 should be Labor and won't listen. Per the stream of previous editors that needed multiple people to convince them otherwise, assistance required to knock sense in to said editor. Timeshift 02:32, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Back to the labor/labour issues 

message: Why is Alexander Poynton marked as Free Trade rather than Labor in 'seats changing hands'? As far as I can see he was never in the Free Trade/Anti-Socialist camp. Timeshift (talk) 16:47, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: No, he was. He was elected in 1901 as a Free Trader. However, the article maybe should still be changed, since according to the ADB it was in 1902 that he switcched back to Labor. Frickeg (talk) 23:49, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

text: Although now, I see that Psephos reckons he switched in 1904. While ADB is obviously a more reliable source, I wonder if we can find something in Hansard to definitively pin down the date. Frickeg (talk) 00:23, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conflicting [[Alexander Poynton]] party affiliation? 

message: 1902 according to ,  and Alexander Poynton, but 1904 according to Adam Carr and Division of Grey/Australian federal election, 1903 et al. I'm not particularly fussed over which is correct, i'm simply looking for consistency and of course the truth... but how can we figure that out? Timeshift (talk) 14:33, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Try again

message: While I was researching the Queensland elections for the 1903 senate results, I found out that the Protectionists and Free Traders did not exist in Queensland. Instead anti-Labor candidates ran under the unified "National Liberal Union" endorsement to not split the vote, which is what Psephos lists the candidates as. Should we consider them as their own entity (as Psephos does), or should we continue considering them as Protectionists (as UWA does)? Also, the House results page says two independents were elected (1 ind, 1 ind labor), is there a reason why only one is listed on the front page? Catiline52 (talk) 01:55, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Very weird that this page doesn't separate Frederick Holder (who is the other independent) - he definitely had no real connection to Free Trade at this point and was very much a British-style independent Speaker. I'm not sure yet about the NLU (although they should for sure have an article), but a good rule of thumb in electoral history is to ignore UWA at every turn. Frickeg (talk) 02:58, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Other than the ALP, federal party affiliations before about 1920 are very murky and you won't get much agreeance between sources. I guess ideally there would be an "official" parliamentary or AEC source that we base our results tables/prose on, and then note discrepancies in other sources. It's difficult to distinguish the political organisations and the parliamentary parties in many cases. In this article we talk about a "Revenue Tariff Party" in Tasmania, but contemporary sources  use this term for the Free Traders. I doubt there was ever anything resembling a separate "party". There are a whole raft of affiliations  based on what the candidate chose to self-describe as, which at some point were distilled into two or three categories. It seems very arbitrary to me. In the 1906 article we distinguish the "Western Australian Party" from the Protectionists, but this was an organisation not a parliamentary party - John Forrest was a Protectionist in parliament and held ministerial office at the time, does it make sense to consider him as a member of a different party? The "Commonwealth Liberal Party" was Alfred Deakin's organisation in Victoria, but we apply this name to the whole parliamentary party which was either known as the Fusion or the Liberals, and supported by various other political organisations inside and outside Victoria. I took a stab at trying to delineate this in Commonwealth Liberal Party#Associated bodies, but it's difficult and time consuming trying to find good sources that go beyond the modern assumption of a united parliamentary party and organisational wing with the same name. Trying to work out who's an independent (and "independent Labor", etc.) is another challenge. For virtually any given candidate I'm sure you could find a contemporary source prior to the election in which they claim independence of party status, blah blah blah, but of course once they get in to parliament you can categorise most of them one way or another. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 05:38, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Apologies for the late reply, only getting back into sorting through the early Senate results. Should we move the Revenue Tariff Party into a subheading of the Free Traders, and the Western Australia Party to the Protectionists then? Catiline52 (talk) 00:22, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  National Liberal Union and other errors