Page 389 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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At a further stage in his interview with Mr Abraham, Mr Collaery maintained that d'Hondt was a gerrymander and he said, in part:
I believe, ironically, if they do do that -
that is, go back to the pure d'Hondt -
we will go back to the original basis that the Rally ran on from 1987 on and that is that the duopoly, the two parties wanting to gerrymander and run the system for themselves and treat Canberra as some type of subservient captive group of people.
Mr Collaery's grammar is not the best, but I think his intention is quite plain. Of course, this argument by Mr Collaery is totally at odds with his previous stand on this matter - as put to the joint committee. I think that it is quite justified that people are absolutely confused as to what it is exactly that the Rally wants. I suspect that, of all of the parties involved in this debate, the Rally has won hands down. They are so addicted to conspiracy theories that they are unable to realise when they are ahead, and keep quiet about it.
I know that the Labor Party has not succeeded in getting single member electorates. I know that the Liberal Party has not succeeded in getting a Hare-Clark system. But one thing we can be sure of is that the Rally is succeeding in getting an unmodified d'Hondt system, as the proposal currently is. In fact, at the end of his program with Mr Abraham, Mr Collaery seems to have realised that he had not quite been consistent early on. He said:
But the fact is that the d'Hondt system brings to this country, Australia, one of the fairest systems.
He goes on:
I imagine that we will have a pretty heated general meeting in the next couple of weeks on this issue if the Federal people on the hill go ahead with this absurd denial of democracy.
So, on the one hand, he calls it one of the fairest systems. On the other hand, he calls it an absurd denial of democracy. That whole confusion is right through all of the evidence that Mr Collaery, Mr Donohue and Mr Jensen have repeatedly given to two inquiries on this matter.
In fact, I think it was summed up when Mr Lee, on the joint parliamentary inquiry, asked of Mr Collaery, "What do you mean when you say that an election is successful if there is maximum democratic representation?", and Mr Collaery replied, "It is successful if you get elected - it is as simple as that - and if you feel you have been processed on
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