Page 647 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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Does that kind of thing occur in the ACT? I submit that it does not. Of course, we have got dichotomies like Red Hill and Narrabundah. They are fairly significantly different suburbs. It is not surprising that Narrabundah tends to vote Labor and Red Hill tends, but not exclusively, to vote Liberal. Those kinds of dichotomies do occasionally occur. But they are nothing like the range of differences which occur in places like Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide or wherever, not what I would call the Vaucluse-Redfern dichotomy. I do not know what other cities would call them.
That example I have chosen, of Narrabundah and Red Hill, is quite significant because those two suburbs fall side by side, they are adjacent to each other, which means that, if you were going to draw an electorate and try to create a safe Liberal seat centred on Red Hill or a safe Labor seat centred on Narrabundah, you probably could not do it because you would have to put both of those suburbs, both those very different suburbs, in the one electorate. I defy members of this Assembly to come back to this place and draw a map which clearly identifies a series of non-Labor seats - seats that would be, if I could put it this way, safe for non-Labor parties. It would not be possible.
That is a symptom of the homogeneity of the ACT, and for that reason, Mr Speaker, I say very squarely that single-member electorates are not appropriate for the ACT; they would not produce a fair result. If you analyse the 1982 House of Assembly election, you come to an interesting conclusion. It was, I think, a good election for non-Labor parties. After all, it resulted in the Labor Party majority being overturned in favour of a coalition non-Labor majority, but - - -
Mr Kaine: Prophetic.
MR HUMPHRIES: Prophetic, perhaps. But, if you redrew the boundaries for that election to create single-member electorates, you would find that every single electorate so drawn, no matter how you drew them, would result in a clean sweep for the ALP; every single seat would go to Labor. With even 35 per cent of the vote, theoretically it is possible for Labor to win every seat. But let us not look at what Labor would call a pessimistic result. Let us look at one where they get - - -
Mr Wood: That was theorised with the d'Hondt system, too, that we would win with this - - -
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I would submit that the figures produced by Senator McMullan, to which Mr Wood I think refers, need a lot more work. He made a number of assumptions in his article in the Canberra Times which I would not support. I would be very happy to raise those issues later when this committee gets down to work. Let us assume, however, that Labor had a good year, that it was a
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