Page 646 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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the first sitting day of 1990. That kind of time frame is also very appropriate, given the heavy responsibilities many of us have on committees and also, I think, given the need for this debate on the issues raised in this motion to proceed in a very calm and orderly fashion for us to give proper consideration to the many complex issues which have already been alluded to in this debate.
I rise to comment particularly on the electoral system which it is part of the terms of reference of this motion for the committee to examine. During the campaign there was little that the various candidates from the various parties agreed upon, except perhaps that the electoral system under which we were operating was a bad one. To some extent, of course, I think they were good criticisms. Certainly I fully endorse the comments of Mr Wood and Mr Moore about the time it took to get a result. When the Electoral Commission originally predicted a two-month wait for a result, I think we all probably thought that was a bit of an exaggeration and it was not likely to come about.
Mr Wood: They claim it was planned.
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes. As my friend Mr Wood says, it may well have been the case in the end that they were very well aware of how long it would take. Indeed, it was almost two months to the day, as I recall, between the election day and the final result coming in. The expediting of the count is a very important matter. I will come back to that in a moment. But the crucial question in this motion, of course, is: What is the best electoral system? Although we might all agree readily that the present system is no good, when it comes to saying what should replace it then we are all, I think, on very different ground and would all probably go in very different directions.
This afternoon the Chief Minister presented the Assembly with a self-indulgent statement on the Fitzgerald report's implications for the ACT in which she made a number of statements, including one which I think carried the implication that gerrymanders of the kind that occurred in Queensland could not possibly occur in the ACT, and she said that "a simple and plain electoral system is the key to effective and accountable government".
I submit, Mr Speaker, that that statement does not really bear close scrutiny. For "a simple and plain electoral system" read "single-member electorates". Is that sort of system for the ACT a fair one? My answer to that is no; it is not a fair one. You have to look at the environment in which such a system is going to operate. Single-member electorates work well in places like New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria and so on because of the environment of those places. Because in those States there is a wide range of socioeconomic conditions which give rise to different political points of view, people know that different sorts of socioeconomic environments create different voting patterns.
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