South Australia has a bicameral (two-house) Parliament.
The House of Assembly (also
known as the Lower House) has 47 members, each of whom represents a geographical area (an
electorate) containing roughly the same number of voters (about 20,000 each) All 47
members serve one term (a maximum of four years) before parliament is dissolved prior to
an election.
The Legislative Council (also known as the Upper House, or House of Review) has 22 members, each of whom represents the whole of the state. 11 members (half the total number) are elected at alternate elections, using a proportional system of voting.
After an election, the party (or parties) which control a
majority of seats in the House of Assembly forms the Government. In the
election of October 
1997, the Liberal Party won 23
of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly, (one less than a majority) and so formed a
minority government, which needed the support of at least one non-Liberal party member to
pass legislation. Since the election, one
independent member (Mitch Williams) has joined the Liberal Party, and one Liberal party
member (Peter Lewis) has been expelled from the party to sit as an independent, so the
Liberal Party still has only 23 of the 47 seats.
The state of the parties in the current South Australian parliament is as follows:
The House of
Assembly |
Legislative Council |
The process of creating a new law can begin in either House of Parliament. A Bill is introduced, read and debated, and goes through various stages: (First Reading, Second Reading, Committee, Report, Third Reading) during which time it may be amended before being sent to the other House of Parliament, where the process is repeated. If the Bill is amended again, then it must return to the House in which it originated for further consideration. Only when it has had approval from a majority of members in both Houses of Parliament can it go to the Governor for assent and proclamation. It then becomes an Act. The process can take many hours of debate, in parliamentary sittings spread over many months.
After each election there is a new "Parliament" i.e. a new composition of elected members. The current Parliament is South Australia's forty-ninth. Each Parliament is divided into "sessions." A session lasts for a year after an election; so that in most parliaments, there are four sessions, over four years.
Each session, in turn, is divided into three "sitting" periods;The S.A. Parliament web site contains a seachable data base of all State legislation and the full text of Hansard dating back to December 1993.
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