Page 854 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 April 1994
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Ms Follett has very clearly, very emphatically, ruled out above-the-line voting being put forward by her Government at this time; but there are a number of qualifications for that. We have no idea of what the use-by date for that promise is. We certainly have no idea of whether this promise extends to below-the-line voting. I still would like to hear the Chief Minister, now that the debate has started, give us some indication of what her views are about ticket voting in the context of this debate. I would particularly like her to start to articulate, only 10 months out from the 1995 election, what her electoral affairs policy is for that election and whether she intends to return to this question. Will she respect the decision which people voiced so forcefully back in December, and which caused her to back down in December, and will she respect the decision made at the referendum in 1992 and not introduce at some point in the immediate future - let us give her another two or three years - some further form of ticket voting? I would like to hear that from her own lips in unambiguous and unqualified terms.
The other point, of course, Madam Speaker, is that when she said that she effectively did not have the numbers in the Assembly - - - (Quorum formed) Thank you, Mr Stevenson. Madam Speaker, it is also clear that when she said that she did not have support for above-the-line voting she was, with respect, not being entirely ingenuous, because the matter had not been put to the elected representatives of the ACT at the time. Mr Stevenson has made it quite clear to me that he is prepared to consider the majority will of the electorate, as he puts it, in deciding whether there should be some kind of ticket system. Ms Follett, I suspect, had at the very least no confidence or no capacity for any confidence that her system as put forward in the December version of her Bill would be rejected. Unless she has had some discussion with Mr Stevenson of which I am unaware, I assume that she does not know what Mr Stevenson's views are about ticket voting. Therefore I can assume that, when she said that she did not have the numbers, either she had had some discussions of which other members of the Assembly are not aware, and I assume that that is not the case, as Mr Stevenson is shaking his head, or she knew that the reason she was withdrawing the suggestion was all to do with not having the support of the electorate, and nothing to do with not having the support of the members of the Assembly.
Mr Abraham put another very good question to her. Referring to the question of what should be in the Bill and what should not, he said:
But why not sort that out beforehand? That would have been fairly obvious ... what the Liberals and Independents were going to do.
Mr Abraham, I would submit, was saying, "Well, why did you not indicate your position? Why do you not put your ideas on the table and let them be addressed by the Independents and the Liberals, and anybody else for that matter, in a broad public debate?". In other words, why was it that above-the-line voting had to be not just not mentioned between February 1992 and December 1993 but actually positively denied every time it was put to her that there was going to be some major variation from the referendum result? I think another commentator made this point very well.
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