Pariksha SaathiAustralia's Milton Dick Elected IPU President at 153rd Assembly in Arusha
Milton Dick, Speaker of Australia's House of Representatives, will be the next President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the global organisation of national parliaments. He was chosen by secret ballot in the IPU Governing Council on 9 October 2026, the closing day of the 153rd IPU Assembly, which met in Arusha, Tanzania, between 5 and 9 October. India's three votes in the election were cast by Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman Harivansh, who led the Indian delegation, and Lok Sabha MPs Anurag Singh Thakur and Kamaljeet Sehrawat; Rajya Sabha MP Sasmit Patra then handed Dick a congratulatory letter from the Lok Sabha Speaker. Before it closed, the Assembly adopted the Arusha Communiqué, a resolution on parliamentary strategies to promote the rights and empowerment of persons with disabilities, and an emergency-item resolution calling for urgent parliamentary action on climate-related disasters and resilience in the Himalayan region and other vulnerable regions. The sittings were presided over by Mussa Azzan Zungu, Speaker of Tanzania's National Assembly, who declared the Assembly closed.
Drafted with AI assistance from the official PIB release linked above and checked against it by a second AI pass. Not line-edited by a human.
Learning context
The Inter-Parliamentary Union was founded in 1889 by William Randal Cremer of Britain and Frédéric Passy of France, originally as a conference of parliamentarians promoting international arbitration. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Its members are national parliaments, not governments, and its main statutory meeting is the IPU Assembly, which is normally held twice a year.
Reference: IPU's own brief history of the organisation
Check yourself: is the IPU a specialised agency of the United Nations?
No. The IPU is an independent organisation of parliaments. The UN General Assembly granted it observer status in November 2002 (resolution 57/32), which lets it take part in the Assembly's work without being a UN body.
Revision task: list the three texts adopted at the Arusha Assembly and mark which one was taken up as the emergency item.
Test yourself
Who was chosen as the next President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) at its 153rd Assembly in Arusha, Tanzania?
Show the answer
Answer: Milton Dick
Milton Dick, Speaker of Australia's House of Representatives, was chosen by secret ballot in the IPU Governing Council on 9 October 2026; the Assembly also adopted the Arusha Communiqué.
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