Page 420 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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government was provided to the ACT was that a preferential system of voting was agreed to. The then Federal Minister supported a non-preferential system. The Senate made it absolutely clear that it would not support such a contention. It would not impose on the ACT a system which had no capacity for preferences, and it forced amendments; it forced preferential voting. Now we find the Federal Labor Government trying to abolish these amendments. This is not the first time that it has done this. It is not the first time that it has seriously suggested that there should be no preferential voting, and we have to ask ourselves why it would support such a patently unfair system.
I also understand that the Federal Government wants to remove the threshold and lift an impediment to the election so-called of small parties and independents. But, of course, that supposed benefit to small parties and independents is more than cancelled by the loss of preferential voting. In any case, without preferences candidates will have to get something like one-seventeenth of the vote outright in order to qualify for a seat and that makes it a much more difficult burden than was the case with some threshold.
There cannot be any question that the abolition of preferential voting will erode the quality of our democracy and, as I said, we would be the only Australian parliament to be elected by a system which was not preferential. Some voters in elections would find themselves faced with the choice of voting for their preferred party or independent with only a slim chance of success, or voting for a party which is likely to succeed but which is not their preferred choice. People would be placed in the cruel position of having to decide whether they should make their vote more likely to be useful or whether they should take the risk of making it a complete waste of time.
The proposals being put forward by the Federal Government are supposed to make the existing system better; but we all know, every one of us here knows, that they would, in fact, make it much worse and less democratic. Small parties and independents, Mr Speaker, have a right to exist and a right to be elected when they have a significant share of the vote, and this is where the Liberal Party and the Labor Party part company. The Labor Party, apparently, is prepared to be cynical enough to support systems which would provide for no real chance for small parties or independents.
Incidentally, Mr Speaker, I think a speaker in an earlier debate made the comment that, having settled, through a referendum, on the electoral system, it would be the end of the matter. I have a different view, Mr Speaker. I think that, if the electorate were to support a single member electorate system of voting, it would not be very long before there would be pressures from those people themselves to change the system because we would see at the
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