One of my great pleasures in retirement is as a part-time volunteer guide at Old Parliament House, Canberra, conducting visitors around that wonderful building that has played such an important role in Australia’s constitutional and political history. The full-time salaried staff includes a team of Public Programs Officers, or PPOs, whose duties include conducting special information sessions for parties of school children from all over Australia, and fostering in them a love of the building and its traditions. Recently one of my PPO colleagues came to me with a copy of Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice (eleventh edition, 2004). In preparing…