Page 4684 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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challenge to members of the Australian Labor Party in this place or elsewhere: If you are so sure that you would not win an election on those sorts of boundaries, I challenge you to draw your own boundaries - I understand that you have done that already - and then apply them to any election result in the last 10 years.
There has been one attempt to do that, I concede, by the ALP. Senator McMullan is purported to have drawn boundaries and then worked out what the result would be, based on single-member electorates, using the figures from the last ACT election, the 1989 one. We have tried to do the same thing, but we have not got anywhere with it. The simple reason is that you cannot make any hypothesis based on those figures because the information about the flow of preferences is not available. People did not cast preferences, and their preferences were not recorded in the way that they would be if we had single-member electorates. We cannot, therefore, factor that kind of result into those kinds of boundaries. We have tried, but we cannot do it.
Senator McMullan, I notice, argues that it would produce a large number of Residents Rally seats, using the 1989 results. I find it incredible that the Australian Labor Party would seriously advocate a system which they believe would consistently result in a large number of Residents Rally seats in the Territory. It is pretty hard to believe.
Mr Kaine: Heaven forbid; Bernard could be Chief Minister!
MR HUMPHRIES: It could result in Mr Collaery being Chief Minister of the Territory. I refrain from commenting on that, but I find it very hard to accept that the Australian Labor Party would seriously put that forward as a suggestion to the citizens of the Territory.
Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, we all know that the 1989 result was highly atypical; that any other result in the last 10 years, either territorial or Federal, would be a much better template to use in assessing what the result might be under single-member electorates. Again, I invite those opposite to use any of those elections that they choose - any one at all; I do not mind which one it is - draw your single-member electorates and see what result you get. I guarantee you that you would win at least 15 of the 17 seats on each of those occasions. You might not get 15 to 17 with the 1975 or 1977 Federal election results. You would possibly get a different result there, but that was more than 10 years ago anyway, so it does not count. I guarantee you that with any result in the last 10 years you will not get single-member electorates to produce anything other than a clean sweep for Labor.
Mr Berry said - I think it is very good to have this on the record - in an aside in this debate, that it would be good for the Territory if Labor were to win all the seats in an election. That typifies the sort of attitude that we get
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