Page 410 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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We can all get some sort of a warm inner glow about supporting this resolution and say that we have done the right thing; but what we really have to do is to put our collective weight, as I think Mr Kaine has indicated, behind the Federal Minister in order that the negotiations at the Federal level can proceed to an outcome in a reasonable time.
DR KINLOCH (8.52): Mr Speaker, I would not want to go on for too long on this matter. Many of the points have already been made; but I would like to address some of the comments made by Mr Connolly and, almost immediately, by Mr Berry who sounds to me like one of the American conservatives in the colonies in 1775 who was urging his compatriots to let George III do it. We hear, "Let them do it on the hill, let it be done on the hill". We are the people who should be crying, "No taxation without representation". We are the radicals, Mr Berry, and I hope that you will join us.
Like many of us in this Assembly, I had no intention of becoming involved personally in representative politics. As recently as 1987 it would have been inconceivable to me. Why give up teaching about other people's politics, mainly the politics of the USA, in order to be in politics? In 1988 I was teaching a course on the US elections of that year - it was tremendous fun; I enjoyed it enormously - and of course had many criticisms of single member electorate systems, of systems which did not have compulsory voting, of gerrymandered systems. Part of a long academic life has been spent looking at an inadequate system. We surely do not want to defend the elements of that system or the inadequate elements of the British system which produces the House of Commons.
Involvement in practical politics came about very gradually for me, but eventually in a rush, in a process which might be called in the first instance "self-selecting". I have heard an attack on that concept of self-selection. I take it as a very important democratic matter that any individual who stands as an independent in politics is necessarily self-selecting. That is how some politicians begin. That is what Ted Mack is. That is what some of our independents are; they are self-selecting. But that does not mean that they are authoritarian. That does not mean that they force themselves onto a parliamentary assembly. It means that they select themselves out of their very great concerns to put themselves before the public who then will or will not vote for them. So do not let us despise a process which produces politicians of a certain kind.
What got me into this business was a worry about the authoritarianism of the Labor Party, the authoritarianism of the Federal Government in many matters over many years. Specifically, in the late 1980s many of us were shocked when the two largest and most dominant parties, the Liberal and National coalition and the Labor Party, decided on the hill, on George III's territory from my point of view
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