Talk:Alexander Fraser (Australian politician)

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Casual vacancy - replaced person from another party

An interesting fact is that Fraser (Country Party) filled a casual vacancy left by a Labor party senator (Richard Keane). As far as I can determine from "Handbook of the 42nd Parliament" [1] p.290-292, this is the last time a casual vacancy was filled by a person of a different party, and the next 25 casual vacancies over the next 28 years were all filled by a person of the same party, until the controversial case of Cleaver Bunton in 1975. Does that warrant mention, either here or at Cleaver Bunton or 1975 Australian constitutional crisis? Adpete (talk) 04:45, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

It's true, but I think we'd need a secondary source noting the significance. There's probably some really interesting work to be done on the reasons for this: by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, of those 25 vacancies, only 10 were filled by an "unfriendly" state parliament (e.g. a state Labor government filling a Coalition vacancy, counting the two Coalition parties as one), and of those, all but one were vacancies arising because the sitting senator died. (The exception? Edgar Prowse's resignation in January 1974, which WA's Labor government filled with David Reid, only a few months before the Gair affair. There must be an interesting story behind that one ...) Lewis's argument with Murphy/Bunton was that the convention only applied to vacancies caused by death, not those caused by Attorneys-General getting (then-)lifetime berths on the High Court. Frickeg (talk) 10:56, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree we need a secondary source. I think the only exception would be if e.g. the Cleaver Bunton article quoted a source saying "this had never happened before", then I think it would be OK for Wikipedia to note that it had in fact happened before, but not since 1946. p.s. There must be a story behind this one too; replacing a deceased Labor senator with a Country party senator certainly looks like a cynical move. Adpete (talk) 23:38, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Have a look through Trove - it'll tell you how it was reported at the time at least. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:48, 2 September 2019 (UTC)