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The campaign coverage of candidates in an Australian federal election in the press, on radio and television and on the internet is compared. The internet gave more emphasis than other media to the Prime Minister over the Leader of the Opposition and to government candidates over candidates representing the Opposition.

It is shown that in occupational terms, electoral support for the important parties was less distinct than it was in the Hawke and Keating years by evaluating the explanations derived from the Australian Election Study surveys when the Coalition won office in 1996.

This article traces the expansion (and contraction) of the Aboriginal and Tortes Strait Islander franchise for Commonwealth, state and territory elections, and to a lesser extent local government elections; it outlines the arguments made for (and against) Aboriginal enfranchisement; and it examines alternative accounts of what drove the expansion (and contraction) of the vote. It pulls together data on Aboriginal enrolment, political awareness and party support, particularly in the Northern Territory. And it examines divergent views about the consequences of Aborigines having the vote: claims that the franchise is an empty formality; claims that it has allowed Aborigines to be manipulated; and claims that it has generated benefits--symbolic, expressive and instrumental.

The usage of data on public opinion during elections by political parties is discussed. Poll-driven politics is a misconception as political parties ignore or defy public opinion for developing their policies.

Ashley Lavelle fails to advance the case for convergence in the debate. By emphasizing party convergence as the key to the emergence of new parties, Lavelle misses a quite different way in which the major parties may open up space for new parties.

Convergence keeps being rediscovered as it is assume d that when a particular label is attached to a party's economic and social policies, everything that needs to be known about them pretty well follows. The main concern of a party convergence is that they seem to continually disappoint their supporters leaving a blurred mark of their own work on the nation's affairs.

This paper does three things. First, it offers a critique of the academic literature on the One Nation vote, focusing on the limitations of the work of political geographers and the methodological shortcomings of survey researchers. Second, it re-examines data from the 1998 Australian Election Study in order to explore the demographic and attitudinal forces that both drove the One Nation vote and distinguished it from the votes secured by the Labor Party, the Liberal and National parties and the Australian Democrats; this highlights the importance of gender, geography and class, of political alienation and of attitudes to Aborigines and immigration. Third, it suggests that the basis of One Nation's mobilisation did not lie in concerns about economic insecurity so much as in opposition to `new class' values, particularly around race. In doing so, it challenges common understandings of the Party's constituency and of its distinctiveness.

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged [...]

A report into indigenous Australian children taken from their families recommended that the Government apologize. Three polls on the question of whether the Government should apologize produced three quite different results: a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ and one which was more evenly divided. This paper shows why this happened. It relates the results to three quite different understandings of what opinion polls should model: opinion expressed through plebiscites; ‘real’ opinion; and opinion based on some sort of deliberation. And it explores the relationship between what a poll-following Prime Minister might have done and scholarly judgments about ‘quality’ in public opinion polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]