About 4 Year Terms Australia

What the campaign wants

The path has two steps. First, a fixed election date, which Parliament can legislate without a referendum. Then a referendum on four-year terms, so Australians are asked to keep something that already works. The report sets out the evidence and each step.

Who runs it

Marty Gray founded 4 Year Terms Australia in September 2025 and runs the campaign. He gave evidence to Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in November 2025.

Why four-year terms

Australia’s short parliamentary terms are a historical holdover. They were written into the Constitution in a smaller and slower world, to line up with colonial terms that no longer exist. Every state and territory has since moved to four-year terms, and all except Tasmania hold them on a fixed date. The Commonwealth is the outlier.

Since Federation, federal elections have come around every two years and eight months on average, on a date the Prime Minister picks. Three budgets fit inside a term. The first pays for election promises and the third is spent winning the next election. That leaves one for reform. Only three of 87 democracies have a term of three years or less, and Australia is the only one that also lets the Prime Minister choose the date at short notice.

Support for four-year terms comes from all sides of politics. What has been missing is public pressure to make it a priority. The campaign exists to build that pressure, with the evidence and a pathway Parliament can act on.

Our work includes

• Fixing Australia’s Elections, our report, with modelling by Mandala Partners and polling by JWS Research (August 2026)
• A submission and a supplementary submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (October and November 2025)
• Evidence at the committee’s public hearing (November 2025)
• A submission to the Senate Select Committee on Productivity in Australia (March 2026)
• A submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into business dynamism (June 2026)
• News and submissions, for everything else