Talk:Referendums in Australia

message: I've emailed the web maintainer of the palamentary handbook, as liked by this article, asking for reproduction permission for the statistics on that site, along with another article I found there which details the history of some of the successful referendums. --Swamp Ig 02:18, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent. While there is indeed a lot of referendum information in that link you've provided, there is an awful lot of good, concise general information in the Parliamentary Handbook. I think some articles could benefit greatly from that source. --mordemur 12:51, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright Permission 

message: On this page I've aserted that at no time has a national majority been overriden by a lack of state majorities, this needs to be checked --Swamp Ig 05:47, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Investigation required 

message: This is comming along nicley now, I've got a basic format for the referendum dates and questions, there's a template for navigation amongst the different referendums. I suspect that the referendum results are a matter of public record and so are in the public domain, but I'm not a lawyer. The referendum question pages all have a results section, with the question and a statement of if the question was carried or not. There's a comment marking the location for the results to be inserted when we get permission. --Swamp Ig 02:18, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page format 

message: Integration of Plebicites into Referendums does not quite work. They have different criteria and that makes it difficult to mark-up which ones were carried. mordemur 14:09, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plebicites into Referendums 

message: Firstly, I'm not very fond of the article titles, or the way they're organised (I strongly dislike the two level page index) at present - I think a better scheme could be found. I'd also like to see more article and less formula. Secondly, there should be no need to ask for permission for statistics - you can just get them from Adam Carr's site, and I don't think it's needed anyway (if permission was needed, we probably wouldn't be able to use it, due to GFDL issues). Nevertheless, it's about time someone got around to tackling this - our coverage of referendums has been terrible up until now, and our coverage pales in this area compared to the Americans. Ambi 10:50, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: It's great to see more good political science articles popping up. However there's something I find a bit strange. The current articles make a distinction between a "referendum" and a "referendum question". So, for example, if you go to a page like Australian referendum, 1911 the disambiguation says that the "1911 Australian referendum was held on 26 April 1911. It contained two referendum questions" (my italics).
It might be a cultural thing but I think that under the strictly correct meaning of referendum a referendum and a 'referendum question' are the same thing. So you would say that in 1911 there were two separate referendums that just happened to happen on the same day. I can't speak for anywhere else but in Ireland when there are two or more votes on one day people talk about two referendums.
But maybe this is a linguistic thing and in Australia the term referendum is used in a different way. If that's the case please educate me. Iota 16:38, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: i think it may be to avoid confusion over the words referenda and referendums. in this context a "referendum" is the occassion where an individual or a collection of "referendum questions" is put to the people. Xtra 01:18, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Terminology: 'referendum' & 'referendum question'

message: This article assumes federal referendums throughout.  The states do hold referendums, and state referendums are "Referendums in Australia" too.  The article needs to make this clear, or failing that, be moved to Federal referendums in Australia. Snottygobble | Talk 03:19, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Federal and State

message: I've found a good parliamentary resource which summarises the "yes" and "no" cases for all referendums to 1988 . I've added it to the links of this page. If someone is keen, they can use it to add background to the pages of each individual referendum. Rocksong 00:18, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Yes" and "No" Cases

message: Should the three referendums (1898, 1899 and 1900) held at the Federation of Australia have separate articles, and perhaps added to :Template:Australian elections ? --Astrokey44 04:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In short: probably no and definitely no. On the former, I can't imagine us having enough to write on each of these to demand them being separate articles, so why not keep them in Federation of Australia? On the latter, I think a natural and obvious division is to limit it to Federal elections and referendums held under the constitution since 1901. The 1898-1900 referendums were state (well actually colony) referendums. Rocksong 12:58, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Federation 

message: Please anybody give me a reference on source (on this page) about Republican referendum on Cocos (Keeling) islands, Christmas island and Norfolk island. Unfortunately, I don't found anybody on  official Australian Electoral Comission web-site about Republican referendum in Australian colonies. If you have more information, will be better if you'll direct give me it. I interested how islanders voted on question of Republic, and who won on the islands: Republicans or monarchists. 
--User:212.98.173.133 00:00 10.08.2007 (UTC)
:As far as I know, it didn't happen.
:Section 128 of the Constitution says: "In this section, "Territory" means any territory referred to in section one hundred and twenty-two of this Constitution in respect of which there is in force a law allowing its representation in the House of Representatives."
:Cocos, Christmas and Norfolk Island are not represented in the House of Reps. Australian citizens living on those islands are allowed to vote as part of some NT and ACT divisions, but the islands themselves do not have representation. The only territories with representation are the NT and ACT. I'll add a mention of this to the article. --ajdlinux | utc 00:39, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Referendum of  November 6th, 1999 in external Australian territories

message: I'm working on what I feel might be better with the list of results. If you want to help out, it's in my sandbox. Cheers. Nick F., Toaster (talk) 23:24, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of results 

message: State referendums have been tacked on the bottom of this list, even though the rest of the text refers to federal referendums. State referendums are not binding and do not change the constitution.--Jack Upland (talk) 03:05, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct that the section State referendums is currently an add on that doesn't add much value. Some state referendums are binding and change the STATE constitution - eg the 1995 referendum in NSW approved the Constitution (Fixed Term Parliaments) Amendment Act which amended the NSW Constitution. Others however are more accurately described as plebiscites, eg the WA daylight saving referendum. The State constitutions & there referendums are, in my opinion, a neglected area that would benefit from more attention. A way to improve this article would be to list all the State referendums & plebiscites, with a long term objective of including an article on each. Find bruce (talk) 10:54, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the confusion is because the federal distinction between "referendum" and "plebiscite" has never really been applied at the state level where popular votes on matters on public policy are more common. The federal distinction isn't actually set down by the constitution (or the law?) and indeed the legislation for the two conscription votes actually used the term "Military Service Referendum" in both Acts' titles, whilst the "National Song Poll" also avoided the word "plebiscite". It seems the conscription votes were only called "plebiscites" in later years.  Timrollpickering 13:19, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  State referendums 

message: The fact is that those two wily old Tories, Sir Samuel Griffith and Andrew Inglis Clark (a Queenslander and a Tasmanian) wrote a Constitution which includes a built-in veto for the small states, which cannot be removed without their consent. They have kept us all nicely tied up by their Constitutional strings ever since. You could make a good case that Griffith, in his grave since 1920, is still the most powerful man in Australia. Paul Benjamin Austin (talk) 14:14, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  the power of the small states 

message: A note in case an issue of page names arises again, the page naming convention of "YEAR Australian referendum (SUBJECT)" comes from RfC on election/referendum page naming format Find bruce (talk) 02:32, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page names 

message: Hi,
In regards to page format, in think it should be changed. Ilovealpacastheysosmart (talk) 03:33, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Page format

message: What is going on here? Please see discussion above, , and the move has created a mess, including a blank page at Referendums in Australia and a redirect from "Referenduma in Australia" - not even a word. It needs to stay as it was to be in line with every other article on Wikipedia about Referendums/referenda in other countries. You can't just go changing things based on personal preference. , I can't work out how the whole history has been moved from the page you blanked, but can you please look at restoring this to the status quo? Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:13, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I've requested this be reverted here. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Page move