This means that lawyers comprise 0.5 per cent of Australia’s voting public. However – and as has long been apparent – legal professionals punch well above their weight in the makeup of Australia’s parliamentary system.

Per Capita, an independent public policy think tank, published The Way In report in September of last year, which noted that solicitors and barristers comprise approximately one-fifth of MPs in the 47th Australian Parliament (i.e. since the 2022 election).

Ahead of the 2025 federal election, it appears that both the Labor Party and Liberal Party (and its Liberal-National arm in Queensland) are staying the course with over-representation of legal professionals relative to the general population.

Of the 153 candidates for both the House of Representatives and the Senate listed on Labor’s website, 31 have practised law or obtained a legal degree, equating to 20.26 per cent of the government’s candidates.

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Labor’s legal professionals include: Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Maurice Blackburn asbestos, dust and occupational diseases lawyer Emily Mawson (running in the marginal Queensland seat of Capricornia), state prosecutor Jarrad Goold (candidate for Canning in Western Australia), law student Heidi Heck (running in the Tasmanian seat of Clark), dual-qualified electrician and lawyer Tom French (candidate for Moore in Western Australia), and Carol Berry (candidate for Whitlam in NSW), who practised at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

On the Liberals’ side, 32 of its 154 listed candidates online are either lawyers or law graduates, accounting for 20.77 per cent of existing and aspiring parliamentarians.

Liberal and LNP legal professionals include: shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, King & Wood Mallesons solicitor Leon Rebello (running in the Gold Coast seat of McPherson), former Law Society of NSW president Jo van der Plaat (candidate in Eden-Monaro), veteran and former barrister Keith Wolahan (Member for Menzies), international trade lawyer Gisele Kapterian (running in the marginal NSW seat of Bradfield), and litigator Stephanie Hunt (candidate for Melbourne).

The persistence of the major parties in putting forward lawyers and law grads is interesting in the current climate, in which diversifying our nation’s Parliament has been at the forefront of recent election campaigns.

Labor, for its part, has an affirmative action policy to ensure gender parity in the preselection of its parliamentary candidates. As of the 2022 election, 53 per cent of the Labor caucus is female.

The vocational backgrounds of parliamentarians are also increasingly broad, from dolphin trainers to former defence personnel. In this year’s election cycle, two Victorian women also campaigned to become Australia’s first job-sharing senators, for a “truly representative” democracy.

This said, even if lawyer candidates (existing and aspiring MPs and Senators alike) largely lost their races and the cohort’s overall representation in Parliament fell by half, legal professionals would still be one of the most-represented vocations among our elected officials.

How one interprets such over-representation of lawyers in our Parliament, and particularly in this year’s election, will depend on how one perceives lawyers.

In 2022, the Governance Institute of Australia’s annual Ethics Index, which surveyed over 1,000 people about their perceptions of ethical behaviour, showed that 35 per cent of Australians saw lawyers as “somewhat unethical” or “very unethical”. Forty-one one per cent saw lawyers as “somewhat ethical” or “very ethical, for a net ethical score of six. In subsequent years, lawyers’ ethical score has not risen above nine. Moreover, lawyers consistently rank in the bottom 10 professions in Governance Institute’s reports.

Politicians rank even worse than legal professionals, with an ethical score of -10 in 2022’s report. Thus, lawyers-turned-politicians are likely to be perceived poorly by at least some voters.

In my view, however, a disproportionate volume of law grads and practitioners featuring as election candidates (and especially the breadth of legal backgrounds among those candidates) speaks to lawyers’ overarching sense of service.

Not content with serving the courts and one’s clients, it is heartwarming, I believe, to see lawyers look to broaden the scope of their service to others – in this context, for the community at large.

Sure, our politicians are well-paid (relative to other professions) – but so are most lawyers. And most legal roles do not require nearly as much travel time as is expected/required of our MPs and Senators.

To this end, I applaud lawyers across the country who are putting their hands up to serve in our nation’s Parliament. Whether they are elected or not, and whether we agree with their political leanings or not, we should collectively acknowledge and appreciate their willingness to be of service to Australia.