Western Australia's first representative parliament was the Legislative Council, first created in 1832 as an appointive body. Initially it consisted only of official members; that is, public officials whose office guaranteed them a place on the council. The initial appointees were the
Governor,
James Stirling, the Senior Military Officer next in command to the Governor,
Frederick Irwin, the
Colonial Secretary,
Peter Broun, the
Surveyor-General,
John Septimus Roe, and the
Advocate-General,
William Mackie. The Legislative Council first met on 7 February 1832. Three years later, an attempt was made to expand the council by including four unofficial members to be nominated by the governor. However, the public demand for elected rather than nominated members was so great that implementation of the change was delayed until 1838. In 1850, the
British Parliament passed an act, the
Australian Constitutions Act 1850 (
13 & 14 Vict. c. 59), that permitted the Australian colonies to establish legislative councils that were one-third nominated and two-thirds elected, but only under the condition that the colonies take responsibility for the costs of their own government. Because of this provision, Western Australia was slow to adopt the system. In 1867, the
governor responded to public demand for
representative government by holding unofficial elections and subsequently nominating each elected person to the council. Three years later, representative government was officially adopted and the Legislative Council was changed to consist of twelve elected members and six members nominated by the governor. Suffrage was limited to landowners and those with a prescribed level of income. When Western Australia gained
responsible government in 1890, a bicameral system was adopted and the Legislative Council became a house of review for legislation passed by the popularly elected Legislative Assembly. This council consisted of 15 members, all nominated by the governor. However, it was provided that once the population of the colony reached 60,000, the Legislative Council would become elective. The colony was expected to take many years to reach a population of 60,000 but the discovery of the eastern goldfields and the consequent gold rush caused that figure to be reached by 1893. The constitution was then amended to make the Legislative Council an elective house of 21 seats, with three members to be elected from each of seven provinces. The first election to the council was held following the dissolution of parliament in June 1894. This system was retained until 1962 when, over the next two years, the council was reformed, creating a series of two-member electorates. Members were elected for six years; one from each electorate was elected every three years. Universal suffrage was also granted in order to bring the council into line with the assembly. This arrangement remained until 10 June 1987 when the
Burke Labor government, with the conditional support of the National Party, introduced a system of multi-member electorates with proportional representation through STV. The legislation was made possible because the
Australian Democrats in 1986 negotiated an election preference flow to Labor in return for an explicit undertaking on Legislative Council electoral reform, which resulted in the defeat of a number of Liberal councillors who were committed to opposing such reform. Following this reform, the state was divided into six electoral regions, three metropolitan and three rural, each electing between five and seven members to the Legislative Council. According to Green, the rural weighting was still significant enough that it was all but impossible for a Liberal premier in Western Australia to govern without National support, even if the Liberals won enough Legislative Assembly seats to theoretically allow them to govern alone. In 2021, the Labor Party used its first majority in both the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly to remove the only malapportionment remaining in any state or territory legislative chamber in Australia. The six individual single transferable vote (STV) districts for the Legislative Council were dissolved. They were replaced by one state-wide district electing all 37 Legislative Councillors using STV. This took effect at the
2025 election. ==Constituencies==