Members of the Australian Senate, 2016–2019

The election was held as a consequence of a double dissolution in which both houses of parliament were dissolved.

This had been the Senate practice on all seven previous occasions that required allocation of long and short terms.

[4] In 1983 the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform had unanimously recommended an alternative "recount" method to reflect proportional representation,[5] and section 282 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act was added in 1984 to provide for a recount on that basis.

[6] This alternative method had been supported by both major parties in senate resolutions passed in 1998[7] and 2010.

[4][8][9][10] Despite the previous resolutions, an agreement between Liberal's Mathias Cormann and Labor's Penny Wong led the Senate to choose the order-elected method again.