The Senate has 76 members, elected through a preferential system in 12-seat state constituencies and two-seat territorial constituencies with a system of single non-transferable vote. Electors choose territorial senators for a three-year term. The state senators serve for a six-year term, with half of the seats renewed every three years.

Three political parties dominate Australian politics. Of these, two govern together in a Coalition:
The Liberal Party is a party of the centre-right which broadly represents business, the suburban middle classes and many rural people.

Its junior coalition partner is the National Party of Australia, formerly the Country Party and now known for electoral purposes as “The Nationals”, a conservative party which represents rural interests.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a social democratic party founded by the trade union movement and broadly represents the urban working class, although it increasingly has a base of middle class support.

Minor parties include:
The Australian Democrats, a party of middle-class liberals
The Australian Greens, a left-wing and environmentalist party
The Family First Party, a party appealing to conservative Christians.

The proportional representation system allows these parties to win seats in the Australian Senate and in the state upper houses, but they have usually been unable to win seats in the House of Representatives (the Greens won a House seat at a 2002 by-election, but lost it in the 2004 general election).

The Liberal/National coalition came to power in the March 1996 election, ending 13 years of Labor government and making John Howard as Prime Minister. He was subsequently re-elected in October 1998, November 2001 and October 2004. The coalition now holds a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the Liberal/National coalition was in a minority until the 2004 election, but from July 2005 it has a working majority there. Until 2004, lacking a majority in the Senate, the Liberal/National coalition relied on negotiations with the smaller parties and independents to secure the passage of legislation.

Since its election, Howard’s conservative coalition has moved to reduce the government’s fiscal deficit and the influence of organised labour, placing more emphasis on workplace-based collective bargaining for wages. The Howard government also accelerated the pace of privatisation of government-owned enterprises that began with the Hawke Labor government. During its first two terms, the government’s most sweeping change was the introduction of a goods and services tax.