Australia: Speaker Time in an Adversarial System

This chapter examines speeches in the Australian House of Representatives from 1990-2019. Our findings are primarily determined by the nature of Australia's Westminster-style system, where the government tends to dominate proceedings. We find strong party effects, government versus opposition effects, and strong ministerial effects on the amount and duration of speeches. The descriptive statistics demonstrate that women and less experienced parliamentarians speak less than male and experienced ones. The gender effect also holds when controlling for ministerial selection. The latter is likely to be explained by men being given more important and prestigious ministerial portfolios. We also find that opposition MPs speak more on average than non-ministers on the government side. However, that is mostly a statistical artifact of their necessarily being fewer opposition MPs, but the rules give both sides of the House approximately equal time to speak. While both gender and seniority are predictive of how much people speak, this is mediated by the fact ministers speak more.