Page 411 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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emotionally, to pass judgment on whether or not the national capital of Australia should become a casino city, without any adequate consultation with the people of Canberra. That is what got me into politics. What got me into politics was somebody else telling me how I should think, how my life should proceed and what my city should be like. I was not going to listen to that from those people on the hill.
May I here pay tribute to John Langmore, the only one of our Federal representatives who actually stood up to oppose that move at that time, although he eventually had to bow to party discipline. Margaret Reid had once opposed the casino, but was also pushed eventually into joining her party's majority. We stood up to oppose that kind of tyranny. Let me remind you, in relation to that slogan, "No taxation without representation", that its original was by James Otis in the 1760s - "Taxation without representation is tyranny". It is tyranny for the people on the hill to tell us how we should go about our business.
That thing on the casino was bad enough. We then had a Federal Government forcing on us a form of self-government and a form of election system over which we had no control whatsoever. Some parties properly fought those authoritarian and essentially un-Australian methods. The citizens of Canberra should be grateful to those parties which made that authoritarianism the focus of their attention. I pay tribute to the Abolish Self Government Coalition, the No Self Government Party and the Canberra First Party. They did well by us.
Now I come to the comments from Mr Connolly. Our own party, the Residents Rally, recognised that there should have been a referendum before self-government. We decided to run to combat that Federal authoritarianism from within the system forced upon us. One could argue about how we selected our candidates. We did it on the run and under great difficulties. We had people telling us that we could not get more than two people up; we had to get enough money; we were out in the community, going from group to group; some people deselected themselves rather than selecting themselves. Once we had a whole group of people who were willing to run, against very great odds, we worked out our ticket in a very democratic process and, might I say personally, in a very traumatic process. There are those here who know what I am talking about.
Behind our thinking, in cooperation with many groups who joined our coalition, we had in our mind not the simplicity of "No taxation without representation"; we were really translating that into the view that, firstly, representation should be with publicly obtained consent and, secondly, representation should be by a system which provides an appropriate and defensible voting system. That is certainly what we stood for. And here we are again this week under, at the worst, an authoritarian and, at the least, a potentially authoritarian Federal Labor Government
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