Page 2620 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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cannot attract them. They might like to join us; they might like to go into politics. They watch, though, what happens to us in public - the demeaning of us, I have to say, often by the media, and perhaps sometimes the demeaning of ourselves.
Are we going to get people who are in secure positions to make that particular sacrifice? It becomes a sacrifice for many of them, especially men and women with families, even to consider becoming parliamentarians. I do not wish to make a special case for men and women with families, but those who do not have families - God bless them - are in a position to make a decision for themselves, whereas people with families are not in that luxurious position.
We are fortunate that there are those present who were prepared to make such sacrifices, but it is not a desirable circumstance to have a legislature composed mainly of individuals who may be in a state of life in which there are no financial circumstances akin to those of most Australian families. What would be very desirable - I think that in a way we have this - is to have some kind of spectrum of single people, people with young families, people with older families, and a range of ages, and that needs to be maintained.
May I remind members that there was once a time in the history of the Westminster system in which there was no payment, no salary, for members. That was justified on the grounds that people should not be paid for doing what was their duty. That was so in the eighteenth century. It was a time of very high corruption. This situation effectively excluded at least 93 per cent, to use your figure - I would say more like 98 to 99 per cent - of the population.
Certainly, no labourers or daily wage workers then had any opportunity to be in the House of Commons. It was only in the nineteenth century - I think we in New Zealand, Australia and some States of the Unites States were in the forefront of this - that there began to be adequate remuneration for people who were going into public life and who were doing so on behalf of groups that had never been represented before.
So, full social justice of political representation depended on salaries for members, and this was not achieved until the nineteenth century. We have to continue to represent that. Funnily enough, it is almost the reverse now. Given the nature of the parties and the ways in which people can join parties, people can now, through their party structures, become selected for election. But there are many people whose financial circumstances now make that difficult.
So in this age of experts and specialists we need to be able to attract such people as medical graduates, accountants, economists, lawyers, journalists, teachers, academics, unionists and public servants to run for the
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