Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Australian politics

There is a potential edit war in Template:Cabinet of Australia regarding the formatting of the ministry list. One user (who edited all pre-Gillard ministries to suit their format) prefers to list the member parliamentary information (when the member is an MP/Senator and of what seat) within the ministry list and showing the "Hon" (against MOS:PREFIX). Others like myself are more for simplicity, where the party column is not even needed for the current cabinet. Any opinions will be welcomed. Marcnut1996 (talk) 01:17, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Discussion now at Template talk:Cabinet of Australia‎. Marcnut1996 (talk) 03:11, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Yilku1: has made significant changes to the results in by-elections to include the distribution of preferences, eg 2018 Wentworth by-election. I have reverted these edits as such a major change to the way in which we present results should be the subject of consensus. My difficulty with the approach is that it goes to far into the detail of the distribution of preferences with no benefit for the reader. --Find bruce (talk) 05:48, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, these are wonk-level results, not the level usual readers would be looking for (and readers who were looking for that wouldn't come here). The presentation then makes it unnecessarily confusing for general readers. These changes are generating problems rather than solutions. The Drover's Wife (talk) 06:03, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

This is a template in the Irish elections since they have ranked voting often have three or four party races (rather than just a two candidate preferred). I can see the applicability of this kind of table in terms of creating a pseudo-3-party preferred for seats like Brisbane or Richmond where the '2 candidate preferred' section doesn't highlight that there were 3 parties with reasonable competition for the seat. Highlighting every single preference flow seems overkill for this purpose though. With a lot of media/research about the decline of the major parties votes and rise of minor parties/independents, there'll probably be a newer way to measure these types of races in Australia. Rather than jump the gun, it's probably a better idea to wait and keep the current table rather than use an extremely wonk-y table like this. Catiline52 (talk) 09:52, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

This is the same thing do in the Irish elections to show the full results. With this table is clearer the flow of votes. With the old table what should you look? Dave Sharma is the most voted but he didn't win? Why there is a Two-party-preferred result and Two-candidate-preferred result? Which is more important? With the Irish table you know the Two-candidate-preferred result is the one you should look. Yilku1 (talk) 17:45, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

We can have both tables in the articles. If any editors are motivated enough to create these full preferences tables, they should be encouraged. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:59, 7 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I think these preference distribution tables are good, but only as an collapsed/expandable section and not replacing the current tables – they're too unwieldy and complex, but if someone is interested and doesn't know how the preference system works or how someone in second or third place can win, they can click on the preference distribution table to expand it. I do find it interesting and have tried a few ways of displaying preference flows using a Sankey diagram (see right). We've had a few discussions about the two-party count appearing in the table where there's a two-candidate result (which is more important). A few things have been tried like placing 2PP after the table with a gap, but nothing firmly decided. --Canley (talk) 00:36, 25 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

 

I quite like the sankey diagrams as the size of the flow is much clearer to me. With more candidates though it too gets complex - eg Eden Monaro with 14 candidates. We also need to remember too that the vast majority of elections and by-elections the distribution of preferences makes little difference to the outcome. Interestingly in Wentworth for example Antony Green only shows where the preferences ended up rather than the 14 previous counts [1] Find bruce (talk) 06:35, 25 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

I'm usually pretty good with researching old figures with Trove, but I've found a politician who seems to be a huge character but whose story I just can't make any coherent sense of whatever. The Sydney Morning Herald's obituary of him (and other obituaries upon his death) utterly contradicts the parliamentary profile, and I literally can't pin down a damned thing prior to 1871 (when I can place him as a newspaper editor in Gulgong). I initially thought the parliamentary library had just done better research, but it looks like they've largely based it on this 1874 profile. Neither article has much in the way of dates that would assist in trying to put some sort of definite chronology on anything. I was really hoping some of you who are also good at this stuff might be able to have a try and hopefully have better luck. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:03, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

I found a few more references in Trove, but not much:

• Editor of the Gundagai Herald (1865)
• Court case – Money lent £5 (1865)
• Another court case, as publisher of the Burragong Tribune (1865)
• Horse accident in Tumut (1866)
• Helped former Qld premier Arthur Macalister write a draft bill for a Goldfields Act in Queensland (1869)
• It's not mentioned in the parliament bio or the obituary that I can see, but there's a lot of stories about him being charged with larceny and misappropriation in 1894 (e.g. [2][3][4].

--Canley (talk) 11:32, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the assist Canley! I've had a few breakthroughs (multiple ways of spelling his name at different times was complicating the picture), and I'm coming to the conclusion that the SMH obituary might just be complete fiction because literally nothing in it prior to his election to parliament seems to check out with sources from the time. The parliamentary library seems to basically have been right (excepting a couple of things I can't verify and suspect might have been errors), and I now wind up running into the same dead end they did in 1862. Which might be the best I'm going to get here. The Drover's Wife (talk) 12:34, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

He got a brief mention in the appendix to Australian men of mark Vol 2 published in 1889, but it doesn't clarify things much & I am dubious about its accuracy as it gets easily verifiable details wrong - first Archbishop was George Browne in 1536

De Courcy Browne, Thomas Frederick, M.L.A., was born in Malta, and belongs to an old Irish family, originally from Devonshire, the first of the family who settled in Ireland being John Browne, the first Protestant Archbishop of Dublin in 1546. Mr. De Courcy Browne was educated in Ireland, matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, and arrived in Victoria in 1853. He has ever since been connected with the mining industry, and has been a chairman of various mining courts and boards in the Eastern colonies. He established a code of mining laws in British Columbia, and is the author of several handy books on the mining laws of this colony. Mr. De Courcy Browne formerly represented Mudgee in the Legislative Assembly, and is at present member for Wentworth. He is Grand Inspector of Masonic lodges in this colony, and is editor of the Freemason.

While it refers to him matriculating, I think this in the sense of being enrolled at the university rather than graduating, but even so, like his parliamentary bio says this is dubious - he wouldn't be the first man of that era to have invented aspects of his early life. Find bruce (talk) 21:15, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Another example of rather dubious biographies of this individual: this obituary in the Orange Leader says he was well-known as "Rolf Boldrewood", author of Robbery Under Arms, who was in fact Thomas Alexander Browne and was still alive at the time. --Canley (talk) 21:57, 24 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Thank you both for that digging. I've never come across an example of obituaries/biographies being so blatantly inaccurate to this extent before. The claim about him establishing a code of mining laws in British Columbia is an entirely new one, and I've not come across any other source that placed him in Canada before (though he is generally credited with = various codes of mining regulations in Australia). The confusion of him with T. A. Browne is another level of slack! There were some really strange ones I came across: one of the most challenging was that many sources credit him with editing the Gympie Times while he was in Gympie, but that paper at that time is in Trove and the only mention of him basically suggests that the paper hated his guts. The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:25, 25 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

The perennial issue of politicians editing their own article has popped up again, this time Catherine Cusack (politician), where the editor either is, or is pretending to be the subject of the article. There is also a new SPA making similar edits. I would appreciate some more views & eyes on the article. --Find bruce (talk) 22:51, 26 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

I have started a discussion at the above page whether the letter "m" in ministry should be upper or lower case. Marcnut1996 (talk) 23:03, 5 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I've started a discussion about some issues I've noticed at List of Australian Government entities which could probably use more eyes than that have that article watchlisted. The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:30, 6 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Just an FYI in case other editors have noticed an issue with {{Excerpt}}. For some reason it appears {{Election box 2pp}} is getting excluded in the excerpt. I have raised it at Module talk:Excerpt#Appears to exclude template and a solution is being worked on. --Find bruce (talk) 05:39, 6 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

  Done Happy with how quickly the issue has been fixed. The template has been much adopted by editors here - a quick count showed nearly half of the 2,659 Articles with excerpts are Australian election results. Find bruce (talk) 09:59, 6 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I know ever since Turnbull changed the titles of ParSec's to Assistant Ministers there's been a shift in convention as to including them in the infobox, a matter seemingly confused by Abbott's use of titles of Assistant Minister titles for those serving on the outer ministry. Further there seems to be some misunderstanding among some users as to what Parliamentary Secretaries/Assistant Ministers are. A ParSec/Assistant Minister is not a Minister, rather per the Ministers of State Act 1952 up to 12 MP's or Senators may be appointed Parliamentary Secretaries, while they sit in the executive they are not Ministers, of which up to 30 may be appointed. I just wanted to get that point clear as I can foresee an emerging edit war on the subject likely to emerge here and here with a user appearing to conflate them with the Ministers Assisting. So to cut to the chase I was hoping to establish some consensus as to whether or not ParSec's/Assistant Ministers are to now be included in infoboxes. Also to establish a central point to touch base on the differences between ministers and parsec's, rather then having the argument in contributions of various pages.The Tepes (talk) 14:11, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I don't see an issue with having them in ministry lists for individual governments - they're formal positions and are generally included elsewhere in coverage of new ministries. I also don't have a problem in principle adding them into ministerial position articles, but would be concerned about the potential for particularly long-serving ministry articles that have had multiple different parliamentary secretary roles getting bloated to all hell. As for the difference between them: you are correct and I don't really see that it's arguable apart from casual misuse of language with formal definitions/misunderstandings of that language. I'm not surprised that there's confusion between "minister assisting" and "assistant minister" because it's not something that would be immediately apparent to most people (even if the factual distinction is clear) so it's probably one of those things that'll need explaining on multiple occasions over time. The Drover's Wife (talk) 00:44, 12 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Re infoboxes, I would personally say it should depend on the individual person. If being a parliamentary secretary / assistant minister is the apex of their parliamentary career, or one of say two or three ministerial portfolios, then let's include it because it's relatively significant to their career (but let's also include it in prose within the article, with a source, because this seems to be frequently neglected). However, if the person has held five+ different portfolios and progressed to senior ministerial office, we should admit their assistant minister roles for the sake of succinctness rather than have an infobox longer than the article that doesn't really add anything for the reader. ITBF (talk) 09:56, 12 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@ITBF: - this didn't seem to be a question about infoboxes, but rather ministry lists (for individual ministerial positions and government ministries). The Drover's Wife (talk) 13:06, 12 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Just thinking, in the Senate composition and member pages, if we should list David Pocock as an independent with the grey colour, or as a David Pocock party member (with some colour) since the party is AEC-registered. Marcnut1996 (talk) 23:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

He's an independent, and we should treat him as such. Unlike the Nick Xenophon Team etc, there is no structure of a political party with an executive board, it's just Pocock. There's a history of independents registering with the AEC to get a name above the line, as Brian Harradine (Registered as 'Harradine Group') had done, as it's a lot harder to get elected otherwise as most votes are above the line and it minimises voter confusion. Every single bit of media calls him an independent too. Catiline52 (talk) 23:54, 21 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Pocock should be listed as an independent per Catiline52. Frankly I think people like Rex Patrick, Glenn Lazarus, Tim Storer should also be listed as independents because their "parties" are just a way to get their name above the line on the ballot papers. Pocock has taken it to the logical extreme of just having his name. Jacqui Lambie is a bit trickier given she has had other people elected under her name. ITBF (talk) 00:03, 22 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Yes, logically, Pocock is an independent. But legally, he represents a party. We can't pretend the latter is not the case. I support listing him (and similar candidates) as independents in a broad sense, but we surely have to also somehow acknowledge the legal reality of his status. HiLo48 (talk) 00:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I think it's a "reality" that's pretty irrelevant - he's just an independent who complied with the requirements to have his name in the box. Often these cases are a little more complex because there's at least the notion of a "team" around them (as with Lazarus, Patrick and Storer) following the literal examples of Xenophon and Lambie who elected running-mates. Here, that isn't the case - he's basically universally described as an independent in secondary sources, there's no pretense of having a broader party, just an independent who complied with the bare minimum requirements for an ATL ballot line. You'd struggle to even source the "party" notion without reference to primary sources. The Drover's Wife (talk) 03:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Strongly agree that he's an independent, which is also how APH lists him. They do the same for Patrick as well, and I think it's usually fairly easy to tell when something is a party and when it isn't. If they run any candidates beyond the single Senate ticket, that's a pretty good sign. Harradine, Patrick, Storer, Pocock are clearly independents; Lazarus is slightly trickier as he ran lower house candidates. APH (as opposed to AEC) is a good guide. Frickeg (talk) 07:46, 22 June 2022 (UTC)Reply