The Cinderella Status of Electoral Law as a Field of Study in Australia

Abstract

From the vantage point of legal scholars,the study of electoral regulation in Australia is a Cinderella field. Given that electora.i laws are the foundations of democratic process, and hence, in contemporary understanding, of the very law making process, this is an odd oversight - perhaps even an occlusion of the legal imagination. Within the undergraduate law curriculum, it has been relegated to the margins of constitutional law. It is summarily taught, if at all, in a hurried, overview fashion in one of the early, notoriously paper-shuffling weeks of the typical constitutional law offering compulsory to the LLB (the same might be said of its treatment in the foundational government unit in many political science degrees). Within the broader profession and society, it has been the preserve of a select group of folk: those who staff electoral commissions; the executive apparatchiks of the major political parties; and a handful of legal practi­tioners. The latter tend to have links to those parties, and are called upon occasionally to advise and litigate 'their' parties' interests in the heat of a campaign or in the wake of a declaration of poll, interests which become acute, not just for the candidates and parties concerned, but for the whole polity, when, as is increasingly the case especially at state level in Australia, elections are close and minority or bare majority governments common­place.'