ABSTRACT
Australia is one of only a handful of countries that have been democracies continuously since the beginning of the twentieth century. When the Federation of Australia was formed, it took most of its traditions from the British colonisers, and embraced central tenets of the Westminster tradition, such as a parliamentary system based upon single member electorates. As it represented the consolidation of six self-governing colonies, it also looked to the other major English-speaking democracy, the United States, and adopted a federal system and a strongly bi-cameral system with a Senate which had equal legislative powers with the House of Representatives. The resulting hybrid has sometimes been dubbed the Washminster mutation (Thompson, 1980).
