Odgers' Australian Senate Practice, 13th Edition.

• Author: O'Brien, Gary W.
• Position: Book review

Odgers' Australian Senate Practice, 13th Edition, edited by Harry Evens and Rosemary Laing, Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2012, 942 pages

The publication of Odgers" Australian Senate Practice, 13th edition is a wonderful tribute to James Rowland Odgers, Clerk of the Australian Senate from 1965 to 1979, and to Harry Evens, also Clerk of the Senate from 1988 to 2009. Odgers, who began compiling this parliamentary authority in 1953, edited five versions of the book with the sixth being produced in 1991 following his death but based on material he had prepared. Evens, the longest serving Senate Clerk, wrote all subsequent editions, co-editing the thirteenth with the current Senate Clerk, Dr. Rosemary Laing who has had twenty-two years' experience working in the Senate. The book will undoubtedly prove invaluable to their President and committee chairs, assisting them to resolve questions on how their legislature should proceed on the business before them as well as to students of constitutionalism who monitor the Senate as to how well it fulfills its constitutional functions vis-a-vis the executive, the House of Representatives and the judiciary.

But the book is primarily addressed to Australian senators and its most valuable contribution lies in its unsaid encouragement to them to develop loyalty to the institution, its purposes, and bicameralism. As Dr. Laing states in the Preface, it not only provides an account of the practices and procedures of the Senate, but also describes "its place in the framework of the Australian Constitution." Australia, which was the first Westminster style Parliament to have a popularly elected upper house, is only one of five contemporary regimes that the eminent political scientist Arend Lijphart has categorized as "strong bicameralism", the others being Columbia, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States (Patterns of Democracy, 1999). Although the dedication found in the twelfth edition has been dropped, this new edition continues the tradition established by Odgers of explaining the rationale of bicameralism, the functions of the Senate and keeps current the chronology of how the Senate has exercised its powers from 1901 to 2012.

On the surface one would assume that Odgers' would have little relevance for the Canadian Senate as the two chambers are so different. Australian senators are elected for six year terms based on a system of proportional representation with preferential voting, while Canadian...