Category talk:Liberal Party of Australia members of the Parliament of Western Australia

New category

I disagree with the creation of this category. It's a state branch/division of a party, not a party unto itself.

But even if this category is to remain, I think it would be preferable to still have all of its members part of Category:Liberal Party of Australia politicians, from which they've recently been removed. Digestible (talk) 12:13, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

The whole idea was that that category was completely unmanageable - try to find anyone in it! The strange thing with these classifications is that the federal party doesn't actually exist (the Labor and National parties have the same problem - the Greens have the Australian Greens but several past Greens MPs were not members of it). The members are members only of the state arm, but a separate division called the "Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party" exists of which all federal Liberal parliamentarians are members. Therefore each MP should be under state, with two exceptions - federal MPs should be solely in the federal category, while those who were both should be in both. Furthermore, for various reasons, the state branches of the parties had much more diversity than the federal party, which was always called Liberal Party of Australia from 1945 onwards, whereas WA and SA both went with LCL for a while. (I won't even go into the mess pre-1945, where we had the Nationalists, most places had the UAP, SA had the LCL, Queensland had the QPP and various other incarnations, etc...)

I created this category after a conversation with a senior WA Liberal MP who was quite amused to be listed alongside John Howard and Philip Ruddock and Robert Menzies, but didn't really think himself that important. (He could live with Sir Charles Court. :)) His PA then wrote to me suggesting a much more esoteric name, and after thinking about it, I settled on this one.

At the end of the day it should always be about utility. With this, one should be able to find every federal MP in the federal category, every state MP in the state category and, through a nicely managed category tree, all the Liberal MPs there ever were. Orderinchaos 13:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

I take your point about unmanageable categories. And about the diversity of historical non-Labor parties. Seems like something worth discussing at WP:AUP Digestible (talk) 18:28, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't really think this category makes any sense under its current name - either in terms of being factually accurate, or as a useful categorisation. While I take the point about the federal/state divide (a technical one that would elide all but the very most dedicated politics-watchers), this mangles altogether different parties in one category. "Liberal politicians" could well put them into about five seperate parties dating back well before the creation of the present Liberal Party, and not necessarily even in ideological agreement with that party. It's confusing, and it's really just factually wrong.

The state and federal branches might be, at a very technical/notional level, separate from each other, but for all practical purposes, and as far as the public is concerned, they're one and the same - everyone in the old category was indeed a member of the "Liberal Party". This is not the case with the revised version. The only case when treating the state branch as a separate party makes much sense, in my opinion, is the Greens (WA) - which actually operated as a seperate entity in more than theory, and to my knowledge had its own categories prior to this anyway.

I'm not really seeing the need to split it up into state and federal MPs in the first place, and I'm not seeing where this helps our readers. The alternative, if we stuck with this system, would be to come up with some long and esoteric alternative to reflect the federal/state distinction - though what benefit this serves our readers I'm not sure. Rebecca (talk) 18:51, 19 April 2009 (UTC)