Page 1196 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 April 1994
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regulations. It is true that, from time to time, those applications will be made, and it is also true that those applications will have some degree of controversy about them. There may be allegations of voting fraud or of breaches of rules regarding campaign expenditure or campaign disclosure. There are some matters which potentially will go to the heart of the outcome of an election. Therefore, it is very important that this process be entirely open and entirely above board.
Provisions of the kind that appear here were inserted into the Tasmanian legislation as a result of some matters that occurred in Tasmania in 1979. I will refer to Mr Terry Newman's book Hare-Clark in Tasmania, and quote briefly from it:
In July 1979 there was a general election for the House of Assembly, in which seven members had to be elected in each of five divisions. On 10 September Mr W.G. McKinnon, an unsuccessful candidate in the Division of Franklin, who had been endorsed by the Australian Labor Party, filed a petition to the Supreme Court of Tasmania against the election of Mr Michael Aird, a successful candidate in that Division, who had also been endorsed by that Party, on the ground of a contravention of the Electoral Act 1907 ...
The petitions were heard in the Supreme Court and there was controversy about the withdrawal of those petitions, and the circumstances under which some of them were withdrawn. The assertion that was made in connection with that particular matter was that it is open, in those circumstances, for there to be pressure applied to people to withdraw applications. There might be some inference that people had been offered, for example, inducements, or, on the other side of the coin, threats of some kind, to not have those matters dealt with in connection with that process.
It is important, I believe, for the court, as a court of disputed returns, to be able to ascertain the circumstances of any withdrawal of an application. If an application is made to the court and it is withdrawn, the court, under these provisions, will be required to make inquiries of the applicant as to why the application is being withdrawn. The court shall publish its reasons for agreeing to a leave application to withdraw an application. By doing so, it indicates the background - that any person has been induced, possibly, or threatened, possibly, to withdraw an application from the court.
I expect that these provisions would be rarely, if ever, used. Since their enactment in Tasmania, to my knowledge they have not been used. In those circumstances we can see thereby a discouragement, a strong disincentive, for people to attempt to influence proceedings before the court by encouraging certain persons who have made those applications to withdraw them. It is, I suspect, not above politicians to be tempted to want, for example, to offer an appointment or a post somewhere to avoid having a matter dealt with in the court, and we should guard against that by these sorts of provisions. They are a major change, but I think, Madam Speaker, that they will be effective by their existence on the statute books. By never having to be used, quite probably they effect the purpose for which they have been put into the statutes.
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