The Legislative Assembly, or lower house, is one of the two chambers of the parliament of Victoria in Australia. The other is the Legislative Council. It sits in Parliament House in the state capital, Melbourne.
The Assembly has 88 members, each coming from a single-member electorate. These are commonly known as seats. These are intended to represent approximately the same population in each electorate. Voting is by the preferential system, as with the equivalent federal chamber, the Australian House of Representatives.
Most legislation is initiated in the Legislative Assembly. The party or coalition with the most seats in the lower house is invited by the Governor to form government. The leader of that party subsequently becomes Premier of Victoria, and their senior colleagues become ministers responsible for various portfolios. As Australian political parties traditionally vote along party lines, most legislation introduced by the governing party will pass through the Legislative Assembly.
The legislation's chief purpose was reform of Victorian Labor's historical nemesis, the Legislative Council.
The history chronicled by Serle in his 1954 article suggested that the role performed by the Legislative Council in Victorian politics during its first century was exactly as the framers of Victoria's Constitution had intended it — a restraint on the democratic urges of the LegislativeAssembly.
Costar's contention that the 1984 legislation stripped the Council of the power to force an early election during the fixed three-year portion of the Assembly term is further discussed in Stone, 'Bicameralism and Democracy', pp.
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