Page 1376 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 1993
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He also says that he knows definitively at this stage, before any debate has taken place, before the people of the ACT have had a chance to make a proper input into this debate, that they do not want what they have now and that they definitely want a city style of council. I have had great problems with Mr Stevenson's so-called opinion polling in the past, his surveying of people. I do not know that his surveying is terribly reliable or accurate. Certainly on only one occasion that I can recall has he actually tabled in this Assembly any of the questions he has asked and the number of people that have been asked those questions or any of the other information concerning this surveying of his.
Mr Stevenson: It has been read out many times.
MR HUMPHRIES: No; he has very rarely presented numbers of people who have actually taken part in debates. He has very rarely presented the way in which he has conducted those debates, the sorts of people who have done it. He has never told us whether the people who have asked these questions have Abolish Self Government stickers on their lapels or have otherwise identified where they come from.
If you want to know how accurate the polling Dennis Stevenson does is, look to the Canberra Chronicle of 12 February 1992, just before the 1992 ACT election. In an ad Mr Stevenson placed, for the rather inappropriately named Abolish Self Government Coalition, headed "Help Abolish Self-Government", he said: "Of 2,200 people we surveyed, 75 per cent want it abolished and 58 per cent said they will vote for abolitionist candidates". He said that 58 per cent would vote for abolitionist candidates, three days before the 1992 ACT election. We all know that at the 1992 ACT election three days later less than 8 per cent - 7.5 per cent, I think - of ACT electors voted for abolitionist candidates. There was only one set, the Abolish Self Government Coalition.
So we have an opinion poll by Mr Stevenson which said that 58 per cent were going to vote for his party, and in fact only 7 per cent voted for his party. Either there was a massive shift in voter support and sympathy over the space of three days or his opinion polling is not worth a pinch of excrement, and I suggest that the latter is the case. I am not going to rely on Dennis polls to find out what people in the ACT really want. I am going to engage, I hope, through my party in a process which is rather more scientific and which does find out what the people of this Territory want. If it is different from what we have now, I will be keen to explore how we can achieve that.
MR LAMONT (4.17): This debate has turned into what, quite appropriately, it would have been turned into had Mr Stevenson been at the Liberal Party Eagle Hawk retreat on the weekend, and that is a realisation by some of the political strategists in the Liberal Party that they need to be seen to be different from the Liberal Party which contested the last ACT election just 12 short months ago and the Federal election that has been won overwhelmingly by the Labor Party in recent weeks. They have attempted to change the view of the people of Canberra as to how they regard the Liberal Party. This should be regarded by Mrs Carnell as a free lesson. You are getting off very lightly. The lesson is very simple: Populism does not work. Simply put, to get on Matthew Abraham's program on Monday, the day after your retreat to your eyrie at Eagle Hawk, to be dragged along by a radio announcer-commentator-journalist, to be led by the nose down the path that you are now, I suggest, embarrassed to acknowledge, is the first lesson that you, as a leader in this Assembly, should take notice of.
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