Posted 01/12/2023 by Nathan Church
On 30 November 2023 Dave Sharma became the Australian parliament’s 644th Senator, filling the casual vacancy created when Senator Marise Payne resigned on 30 September 2023. In doing so Senator Sharma becomes the 53rd person to sit in both chambers of Australia’s federal parliament, following his service in the House of Representatives as Member for Wentworth from 2019 to 2022. This Flagpost article reviews the history of those who have followed a similar path and the reasons it can occur.
James McColl was the first federal parliamentarian to serve in both chambers, when he commenced as a Senator for Victoria on 1 January 1907. McColl had been the Member for Echuca since 1901 but a proposed Victorian electorate redistribution during 1906 threatened his chances of re-election. Accordingly, he resigned from the House of Representatives on 5 November 1906 and was successfully elected to the Senate the following month.
As in McColl’s example, 30 of the 53 (56.6%) parliamentarians who have served in both chambers have moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate. Conversely 21 (39.6%) senators have moved to the House of Representatives. The remaining two parliamentarians—Jack Duncan-Hughes and Sir Philip McBride—are particularly unique, in having moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate, but then back to the House.
Like Senator Sharma, approximately half the parliamentarians who switched chambers did so after losing an election and sought to re-enter parliament. Eight of these (including Senator Sharma) filled casual vacancies, with the remainder successfully contesting another election. The other half proactively resigned or retired from one chamber to move to the other. Notably, Duncan-Hughes and McBride’s multiple changes included both retirement and electoral defeat.
There are currently 8 federal parliamentarians who have served in both chambers: Senators David Fawcett, Pauline Hanson, Sarah Henderson, Deb O’Neill, and Dave Sharma; and MPs Barnaby Joyce, David Smith and Matt Thistlethwaite. However, the most there has ever been at the one time was in mid-1996, when 11 parliamentarians had served in both the House of Representatives and Senate.
Senator Pauline Hanson holds the record for the largest gap between different chamber service. There was almost 18 years between her election defeat on 3 October 1998 as the MP for Oxley and her return as a Senator for Queensland on 2 July 2016.
Some other notable examples include Bronwyn Bishop, who holds the record of longest serving woman in Parliament – almost 29 years. This total includes her Senate career from 1987 to 1994, prior to her transition to the House of Representatives from 1994 to 2016. Most prominently known as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 12 November 2013 to 2 August 2015, she was also a Minister for over 5 years between 1996 and 2001.
Another is John Gorton – who remains the only Australian Prime Minister to have served in both chambers. A senator since 1949 and Cabinet Minister in Harold Holt’s government, he was sworn in as Prime Minister on 10 January 1968 following Holt’s presumed death from drowning on 19 December 1967. Given the practical convention that the Prime Minister sits in the House of Representatives (where the government in formed), Gorton resigned from the Senate on 1 February 1968 to contest the by-election for Holt’s previous electorate Higgins held on 24 February 1968.