Government MPs have revived the possibility of extending parliamentary terms to four years, with the perennial issue raised in the Coalition’s party room meeting this week.

Rowan Ramsey, the government whip, told Coalition MPs in Canberra that they should rally behind the idea of extending the term of parliament from three to four years, bringing the commonwealth in line with most of the states and territories.

Doing so would require changing the constitution which can only be achieved via a referendum, a point made clear by special minister of state, Mathias Cormann.

But Ramsey told Guardian Australia he believed there was popular support among the public for voting less often, and believed change could be achieved if the proposal had bipartisan support and was put to the public at the next election.

“I raised it because I thought it was a reasonable idea and I would hope that we could build some kind of consensus on it, in conjunction with the opposition,” Ramsey told Guardian Australia.

“You would only do it if it had the support of the two major parties, and you could do it at the next election.

“If everybody was on board, I think it would get up.”

He suggested the extended term would not necessarily apply to the next term of government, saying it could be a longer-term proposition.



The idea of four-year terms last gained currency when then opposition leader Bill Shorten called in 2017 for a joint movement to extend parliamentary terms to four years, an idea that won support from Malcolm Turnbull at the time.

Shorten said the change would create certainty and allow for bold policy changes.

“Governments can be more daring and more determined if they’re not constantly thinking about the next election,” Shorten told the ABC’s Insiders program.

“What this country needs is long-term policymaking, over the cycle of polls and two-and-a-half-year cycles.”

But the debate over extending Australia’s parliamentary has been debated for decades, and was put to a referendum in 1988.

At the time voters were asked whether they wanted to “alter the constitution to provide for four-year maximum terms for members of both houses of the commonwealth parliament”, but less than 33% of voters supported the idea and there was no majority yes vote in any state.

A report found that while there was support for increased federal parliamentary terms, the proposal was defeated because it was combined with other contentious proposals, including a reduction in the Senate term to four years.

Kevin Rudd also promised a referendum on extending the term of federal MPs in 2007, but this did not happen.

Under the current system, election dates are variable, but must be held within three years from when parliament first sat after the election. The average length is around two-and-a-half years.

A major stumbling block for the reform is what happens to the Senate, which currently has six-year terms, subject to half-Senate elections every three years.

Options to address this include eight-year Senate terms, while maintaining half-Senate elections, or four-year terms with a full Senate vote at the time of each federal election.

According to the University of Melbourne’s Election Watch project, Australia is an international outlier, with four- to five-year terms the norm in most democratic systems.