Page 1200 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 April 1994
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the position taken by the Federal Government. Of course, we did not. We heard nothing but the stoutest defence of the Federal Government's position from the Chief Minister. So I must say that it sounds highly implausible to hear her now say that how-to-vote cards, which are, after all, simply another form of electoral advertising, should be permitted under this new system. It seems that freedom of speech is a fairly dispensable commodity.
Madam Speaker, how-to-vote cards are wasteful of human resources, they are environmentally unfriendly, they are irritating to a great many voters, they are an affront to the fundamentals of the Hare-Clark electoral system, and they are, perhaps worst of all, intensely confusing to many people and will actually accelerate the process of causing informal voting to occur. This argument, I think, is a very important one, and we need to understand the nature of the system. I particularly want to address an argument to Mr Stevenson, who has already put himself on the record as being in favour of people power, of giving people the maximum capacity to make decisions for themselves and to exercise a sort of people power basis of influencing decisions in this community.
The ALP argues that a how-to-vote card provides information; it merely tells people what is going on; there is no compulsion to use it; it just tells people what is going on; it is a very innocent kind of device. That, Madam Speaker, is, I think, a disingenuous approach. The real reason how-to-vote cards are important is that they undermine the value of the unstructured votes that people cast in an election campaign. Many ALP voters, who know that there is a how-to-vote ticket, who see that there is an anointed order, will believe, by the mere existence of those cards, that their vote, if it departs from that preordained ticket, is unlikely to succeed or will be of less value because it conflicts with that preordained order. Because people assume in these circumstances that the approved line, the party version, will predominate, very often they believe that they have less choice in making a different decision. That, of course, strictly speaking, is a misapprehension on their part in one sense. People have, under this system, as they have under the Senate system and as they have under the House of Representatives system used in this Territory, a free choice about what candidates they vote for and in whichever order, and they can number them from last to first, if they wish to, in contrast to the party's preferred order.
I think I can illustrate what I am saying by looking at votes for the Senate. It is perfectly possible for the electors of, let us say, New South Wales to vote for the bottom candidate on a particular ticket, and then vote up the column, and vote for the preferred candidate from a particular party last. This is perfectly possible in theory, but in practice it does not happen. My understanding is that, since the present basic system was adopted half a century ago, the electors of no State or Territory have ever succeeded in reordering the party ticket in the sense of who was elected. Party voters have always ended up giving us the order which has been determined by the parties. Does that prove that people actually like the order that the parties have determined, or does it prove that the mere fact that an order has been determined directs and overcomes the residual opposition that electors would feel towards reordering it as they see fit?
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