Page 2127 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 9 September 1992
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one-seventeenth of the members to be elected cannot be called proportionally representative. It does not make any sense. It is a form of Hare-Clark, but we should understand that you can introduce a Hare-Clark system under different numbers of electorates. It does not have to be three. The question and the debate, at all times, were misleading.
As for trying to get the opposing view across, or another viewpoint about what most people want, why not allow the people a real choice? Allow them to say whether they want a proportionally representative system with 17 members, under whatever system you use to elect them, Hare-Clark or otherwise; whether they want three electorates; or whether they want 17 single-member electorates. That would have been democratic. We did not have that. Just to carry on with the statistics, 50 per cent of people prefer proportional representation, 25 per cent prefer three electorates and another 25 per cent prefer 17 electorates.
I would not want to say that any government would rig election questions; but, if you are confronted with a situation where half the people want a particular question and the other half are divided between two questions, the best way to handle that, if you do not want the 50 per cent question, is to give them a choice between the other two. Then you can say, "Well, the people have spoken; they want three electorates over 17 electorates". That is not really okay and it never was. I thought it relevant that I once again raise that point. That the majority of people want three electorates over 17 obviously is the case, but the suggestion that they want three over fewer is not true. Various comments have been made by members of the Labor Party about whether this has something to do with self-interest. No, it has not. I do not operate from that point of view.
If you do not understand the surveys, and I think you do, by all means do some yourselves. There are different ways of using surveys. You can survey people to find out how best to promote to them a particular line, like selling a product. What will get them to buy this product? Do not ask what product they need and want and then supply that one. As for those people who comment on surveys, it is a wonderful situation in Canberra in that anybody can go out there and ask survey questions. We hear comments about the surveys that we have done, but we do not find someone coming up with different results from their own surveys. When we start seeing that done we might think that some people who comment are doing so on a reasonable basis.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (3.57): I am quite happy to defer to Mr Lamont.
MADAM SPEAKER: I was waiting. Do you want to speak, Mr Lamont?
Mr Lamont: I will split with you.
MR KAINE: Right. I will leave you 2 minutes.
Mr Lamont: You go first, then I can refute your arguments. That is fine.
MR KAINE: You will not be able to, so just stand slack.
Madam Speaker, I have found this debate very interesting. I have discovered that the Government has absolutely no case that they can argue. The Chief Minister stood and waffled on. Let me refer to some of the things that she said. She said,
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