Is this month's Senate active enough? [Senate Statistics]

Day 779, 13:10 • Published in Australia Australia • by H.Nelson


Dear Readers,

As you may have already seen it yesterday my fellow Senator, Infin again released his usual Senate Voting Record, i.e. a table containing the activity of each elected Senator during their term so far.

I think it would be a good idea to illustrate his findings with a simple graph or two. The document can be found here (also, thanks Infin for his permission to use it as a data source for my article).

With the following charts being quite self-explanatory I will only include some short notes as a personal opinion here and will leave it to the citizens to judge the quality of the work each Senator and the Senate as a whole have carried out so far.

Note: three Senators have already resigned from their office without contributing any substantial to the work of the Senate. That leaves us with a total number of 44 Senators, the following percentages are based on this number.

Distribution of Senators by attendance



The above graph shows that there are 11 Senators who cast their votes on every single proposal; that is 25% of the Senate. These Senators are worth a mention, being the most active ones so far:

¤ Adam Creedy (ANP)
¤ Alex Australis (AI)
¤ Binda33 (ANP)
¤ Brenflakes (ADP)
¤ Calbe (ANP)
¤ Darth Spader (ANP)
¤ H.Nelson (AI)
¤ Hinokai (PaPP)
¤ Infin (ANP)
¤ Super Christopher (ERA)
¤ Xerenity (PaPP)

If we look at the graph carefully we can see that all in all 21 Senators can be regarded as 'highly active', taking part in more than 80% of the voting processes so far during this term.

We can find 10 Senators labelled as 'moderately active', voting on less than 80% but on more than 40% of the total occasions.

Unfortunately a total number of 13 Senators (30% of the Senate) failed to make it to the Voting Hall regularly, only participating in less than 40% of the voting processes, being labelled as 'inactive'.

Activity of the Senate

Here you can see the exact same data as above but this pie chart is more focused on the overall performance of the Senate.



Although we can see some very promising trends lately I still think this level of activity is not enough. Almost one third of the Senate being clearly inactive (only one of them indicating his absence prior to his planned leave) is something a nation stepping out on the world stage simply cannot afford.

If you appreciate my efforts informing the eAustralian public and would like to read some more analyses on local events in the future, please do not hesitate to


Best regards,
H.Nelson
Senator for Queensland (4th term)
President of the Australian Independents
ACU Koala, Foxtrot Squad