Anne Twomey

Australia must go to the polls to vote on the Voice. Some of us have never voted in a referendum, here’s what you need to know.

Here’s what the Voice question says, what’s new and what happens next.

When is a cabinet not a cabinet? When it is really an intergovernmental body that is pretending to be a cabinet so it can avoid transparency.

The Queen exercises extensive soft power by influencing government policy and bills before they are introduced to parliament.

A ‘state of disaster’ has been declared for the whole of Victoria from 6pm, Sunday August 2, for a month. How is this different from the existing ‘state of emergency’ and what powers does it give the Andrews government?

The High Court’s decision opens the possibility that we will finally see the last pieces of factual evidence about The Dismissal – revealing the concerns and reasoning of the governor-general, as events occurred, without the gloss of hindsight.

Debates about constitutional change in Australia inevitably raise the poor success rate of referendums. So why was the referendum chosen as the means of amending our federal constitution, and was it really intended to be so hard to succeed?

While the houses are under a moral and political obligation to obey the Constitution, this is difficult when the Constitution itself is unclear and its interpretation is disputed.

A minority government would not mean the government would fall – but it would make governing more difficult, says Anne Twomey.

Section 44 of the Constitution has struck down many a politician in the past year – but is it powerful enough to take down the Liberal leadership challenger Peter Dutton?

The message to every aspiring politician is to check your family tree, identify any foreign citizenship you may have and renounce now.

There is still a risk that ministerial decisions made by a disqualified MP could be successfully challenged. Professor Anne Twomey explains which decisions are safe, and which ones aren’t.

It’d be better for ministers like Barnaby Joyce to have any potentially contentious decisions made by an acting minister until their citizenship issues are resolved.

OPINION: COAG wasn’t the unmitigated success the prime minister may have hoped. But in rejecting a system where state differences could leave some behind, Australia will also miss the benefits of experimentation.