Page 1301 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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As I mentioned, I do not intend to go over the issues again. What the committee has done is to examine ways in which self-government can be modified to best serve the citizens of the ACT. In most of the recommendations the point at issue is that, given self-government for the Territory, it should be meaningful and the Territory must have control over its own future.
A lot of the submissions we got were very different. Groups and individuals have different attitudes and they thought different issues were important to the ACT. I am not going to go on any further. As I said, I feel Mr Jensen went over a lot of the points that I was going to go over. Before I sit down I would like to thank the other members of the committee, also Mr Kaine and Mr Duby who were on the committee at some stage, and Cheryl Scarlett, Karin Malmberg and Kim Blackburn for their help on the committee.
MR WOOD (10.54): Mr Speaker, this report was originally to be subtitled "The Craig Duby Change of Name Report". With that in mind, there was always the potential for a deal of disruption or nonsense to be incorporated into the report. In fact, it is a serious and comprehensive report which, in some areas, I disagree with but in the main it has my support. It was designed to enable Mr Duby and the No Self Government Party to justify their change from that title to something else. I understand he was considering at the time when the Follett Government was overthrown - since they had so much letterhead everywhere with NSG on it - changing it to the "Now Self-Glory Party", but that has not happened. Another name was chosen.
I want to speak, firstly, about the d'Hondt system. Although in our consideration it was not central to the debate on this matter, nevertheless, it has occupied a major role. The terms of reference do not indicate that we should have spent all our time on it but at various times committee members have realised it occupied a large part of our consideration. After all our consideration I can say to you that I am still not absolutely clear on how that system worked.
There were three reasons why d'Hondt was so criticised and why it is in such poor repute. The first relates to a matter that Mr Jensen raised, and that was the reluctance of the ACT community to accept the idea of self-government. No matter what system had been proposed, I am sure that it would have been agreed to reluctantly. I do not know that there was so much reluctance but there certainly was some considerable opposition. However, I suspect that in the community there was a willingness to accept responsibility for our affairs.
The referendum which was held about 1978, from memory, was poorly worded in the sense of being used as an argument to say that people in the ACT did not want self-government. That referendum, as I read the figures, said that people
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