Page 1302 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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wanted to have responsibility, but three options made it difficult to define just how that responsibility was to be accepted.
Certainly there was no difficulty - I concede this - in numbers of groups in the community running against the whole idea of self-government. Certainly in some areas of the community there were people who were prepared to work against that idea, who thought that self-government was going to mean a reduction in living standards; people who did not realise that whoever was running the Territory was going to do it on a severely constrained budget; people who thought that the Federal Government was going to provide a pot of gold forever. I am surprised, given all the debate there has been, that people would have that thought, but it was certainly there.
This ability to spark a debate against the idea of getting away from our comfortable former existence led to a variety of groups, some of whom are represented in this chamber today, opposing the whole notion of self-government; and this is the second reason why d'Hondt failed. When you are running for self-government and for responsibility for our affairs, it becomes difficult to do so in a serious environment when there are people running on a ticket against it. Indeed, I think no less damaging were the people who tried to lighten the whole affair by forming nonsense parties and being nonsense candidates. That is a further reason for the d'Hondt failure. There was a list of 117 people on that museum piece now, the ballot-paper. That was obviously not going to help enhance d'Hondt in the minds of people.
The third reason for the failure was the Australian Electoral Commission itself. We all recognise that they did get a very difficult system to operate. I know that. I have tried to go through it and to understand it thoroughly and I accept that it was a difficult system. They said it was, and I do not argue with that. But, having once acknowledged how difficult a system it was, the Electoral Commission set out, in the way it conducted the election, to prove that it was a difficult system. I believe the officers could have shorn two or three weeks off the counting time if they had set their minds to it, but they were determined not to do that.
I have dissented from the body of the report that gave a preference order for electoral systems. I do not want to say, as my two colleagues did, that d'Hondt provides the best system. I will leave that for the community to decide. I have the confidence that the Labor Party will perform well whatever the electoral system is. You can debate endlessly, but give us any of those three choices or any other choice and the Follett Government will be the government after the next election - whenever that is. Whatever system goes, I have confidence in it.
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