Page 851 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 April 1994
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MR WOOD: Madam Speaker, I believe so. I see that group and others in the non-government sector regularly. They and the department carry on routine discussions. I believe that they have met. I do not check that they do meet at particular times, but I believe that there are discussions. In particular, there are discussions between the non-government schools advisory committee that I have established and the department. That, of course, is the primary point of communication.
Ms Follett: I ask that further questions be placed on the notice paper.
ELECTORAL (AMENDMENT) BILL 1993
[COGNATE BILL:
ELECTORAL (AMENDMENT) (CONSEQUENTIAL PROVISIONS) BILL 1993]
Debate resumed from 16 December 1993, on motion by Ms Follett:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MADAM SPEAKER: Is it the wish of the Assembly to debate this order of the day concurrently with the Electoral (Amendment) (Consequential Provisions) Bill 1993? There being no objection, that course will be followed. I remind members that in debating order of the day No. 1 they may also address their remarks to order of the day No. 2.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.03): I will take up the response of the Opposition initially on this matter. Madam Speaker, it has taken a long, long time to reach this point, the point where the Assembly can begin to debate the Electoral (Amendment) Bill which will determine the system which the ACT uses to elect its Third Assembly in February of 1995. There are many people who have been keenly interested in this process, who have watched it for some time, who have waited for the outcome, who expected certain things to happen sooner than this and who will be, I suppose, pleased to have reached this day. They will be even more pleased to see the end of this debate and the gazetting of the new electoral Bills. Many of them live in hope that what they will see will be something like what was decided by referendum in February of 1992 when the electors of the ACT, by a huge margin, supported the creation of the Hare-Clark electoral system as the system which the ACT will use for future elections.
This Bill, which was directly spawned by the referendum of 1992, has had a longer gestation period than an elephant, and it appears to be as cumbersome, as unwieldy and as strange looking as an elephant in many ways. What we have here is nothing like what many people expected. In fact, when one looks at the terms of this Bill, sees the details and reads its provisions, one very quickly comes to the conclusion that the Government had very good reason to take so long to reach the stage where it would table it, because it needed, obviously, every bit of that two years, between the referendum and the introduction of the Bill, in order to transform the decision made by the electors of Canberra into something that suited the factional needs of the Australian Labor Party.
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