Page 1229 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 April 1994
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Mr Humphries: We will. Our amendment will do it.
MR STEVENSON: Good thing. I will support it. Oh, do you mean this amendment? I mean to stop voting cards being crooked. We could stop a lot of the problems caused by non-representative voting by giving a choice to the people of Canberra - a single electorate with a good proportional representation system. PR in this town is dead. Certainly, in one of three electorates you have a proportional representation system. You could have a proportionally representative system in 10 electorates in this town. PR for the ACT is dead, and we know that the Federal Labor and Liberal parties killed it. The Democrats tried to stop it, and commendation is due to them.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (5.41): Madam Speaker, I would like to address that last point that Mr Stevenson raised. I refer members to proposed new section 290 in the Electoral (Amendment) Bill. It is headed "Misleading or deceptive electoral matter" and it says:
A person shall not disseminate, or authorise to be disseminated, electoral matter that is likely to mislead or deceive an elector about the casting of a vote.
Penalty: $5,000 or imprisonment for 6 months ...
Madam Speaker, I wanted also to have a very quick word because I have heard so much about the Labor Party's intentions in this matter from such well known Labor Party experts as Mr Humphries, Mr De Domenico and Mr Moore. I thought it was timely to have a look at the intentions and the actions of another very important group, the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee. Members will be aware that it was the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee basically which conducted the campaign for the Hare-Clark system. It was a very good campaign, a very successful campaign, and all power to them for doing that. But, Madam Speaker, members might not be aware that the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee were completely silent on the question of how-to-vote cards. Madam Speaker, it is the case that the referendum options sheet has nothing to say about how-to-vote cards.
I understand that Mr Miko Kirschbaum, of that committee, said at a recent meeting of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia that the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee deliberately did not include any reference to the banning of how-to-vote cards in the referendum options description sheet. It was a deliberate act. Madam Speaker, according to my advice, this was because the committee itself did not agree, amongst themselves, about whether the banning of how-to-vote cards was a part of the Hare-Clark system. The Hare-Clark Campaign Committee was not able to form a unified view on that matter. I also believe, Madam Speaker, that Mr Kirschbaum said at that meeting that he personally supports the availability of how-to-vote cards. Given that that is a view that is held within the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee, I find all of the statements about how-to-vote cards being inherently wrong under Hare-Clark to be utter nonsense.
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