The Australian Federal MPs: Changing Recruitment and Career Profiles

Abstract

In this chapter we extend our analysis to the entire Australian national ‘political class’—the federal parliamentarians. To explore the issue of the changing quality of our federal parliamentary elite in more detail, three comparisons were undertaken using data we compiled on 570 federal parliamentarians who entered politics between 1901 and 2013, and whose political careers were recorded in sufficient detail. The data covers important aspects of their backgrounds and political careers and focuses on those aspects that are relevant to our main hypotheses: ‘political recruitment matters’ and ‘the political class has qualitatively declined’. We analyse these data and present the results in two steps: An analysis consisting mainly of the comparison of ‘political generations’ of Australian federal parliamentarians, with a special emphasis on changes in recruitment that have been occurring over the last 30 to 40 years (Chapter 4); and A more descriptive and ‘qualitative’ analysis, also comparative in nature, of the most senior federal parliamentarians, again with a focus on more recent changes (Chapter 5).