Backbencher

lecture 7 was titled Politics: Commonwealth and Dominion, and as we have learned this entire semester Australia and New Zealand have a lot of similarties and differences that makes each of them related, yet unique from one another. Yet this lecture got into the differences of the governments in each country. For example Australia has a two part government system similar to the US in the fact that they have a federal government and a state government, but a big reason for this is because Australia tends to have a much more organized government system because of the way they were formed in the past when the nation was being developed, with very little politics getting in the way and this lead to the formation of the Confederation of the Commonwealth in 1901, and i guess you can say that that is really when and where the government began to become organized. While New Zealand only has a Federal government it is effective because it is a much smaller land than Australia and does not tend to have to have state governments in order to control things with in the nation. On an interesting note it should be stated that both governments do have a two party system with in themselves with the labour party and the liberal party, which in a sense i think comes from the British influence in these 2 nations pasts. Another thing I liked was talking about the Political leaders of the nations, with the Prime Minister of New Zealand being Helen Clark, but as Isern noted John Key might steal that powerful title away, leaving New Zealanders with questions about the government similar to what we experience here in the US with each presidential election. overall the lecture was informative but tended to be a little dry at times mainly just because of the subject matter.

Matt Liese