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0 pointsjacques_chester13y ago0 comments

It could be worse. The US Congress has 2-year terms for their lower house. There's never a moment when the next election is out of view.

Most Australian states have 4-year terms, some of them are fixed by legislation. Whether or not it improves matters is obscured by the problem that anybody with talent is trying to get into the Commonwealth Parliament. Our State governments are traditionally fantastically inept and frequently corrupt, regardless of party.

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vacri13y ago· 2 in thread

Australia also has a law preventing electioneering more than 30 days out from the election. Sure, the pollies are always jostling for media space and saying "we're better than those guys", but they can't pay for political advertising outside the electioneering period - if you're not interested in politics, you won't see much in the media in-between elections. This moratorium on political advertising is one of our most unappreciated laws.

jacques_chesterOP13y ago

It's not 30 days. It's 3 days.

It's from the Wednesday before the Saturday of the election, until and including that Saturday.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/bsa1992214...

vacri13y ago

Where are you getting only 3 days from? It's definitely not 3 days from experience. Either that, or every funded political party is breaking the law.

EDIT: rereading your link, it looks like it's 33 days at the local council level, but at the federal level it's 'when the election date is called', which works out to being a similar thing (as it's usually a similar amount of time): the years between elections are free of electioneering.

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