Parliamentary Bookshelf
Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice, 13th Edition, edited by Harry Evens and Rosemary Laing, Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2012, 942 p.
The publication of Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice, 13th edition is a wonderful tribute to James Rowland Odgers, Clerk of the Australian Senate from 1965 to 1979, and to Harry Evens, also Clerk of the Senate from 1988 to 2009. Odgers, who began compiling this parliamentary authority in 1953, edited five versions of the book with the sixth being produced in 1991 following his death but based on material he had prepared. Evens, the longest serving Senate Clerk, wrote all subsequent editions, co-editing the thirteenth with the current Senate Clerk, Dr. Rosemary Laing who has had twenty-two years’ experience working in the Senate. The book will undoubtedly prove invaluable to their President and committee chairs, assisting them to resolve questions on how their legislature should proceed on the business before them as well as to students of constitutionalism who monitor the Senate as to how well it fulfills its constitutional functions vis-à-vis the executive, the House of Representatives and the judiciary.