Page 981 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 April 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I hope that he will take up the opportunity to convince me that the polling has some veracity. He has given me copies of press releases. He has not given me details of polling, and he did promise that. I look forward to seeing that. I hope that I have jogged his memory. I must indicate that at this stage we ought to accept that four-year terms are a matter for which this Assembly has no mandate.
MR STEVENSON (8.44): Madam Speaker, Mr Moore's statements do him no credit. Unfortunately, he said a number of things that were not correct. It cannot be assumed that he was inadvertently wrong because I had just covered some of them. He started off by saying that I have claimed that I do not have to support the 1992 referendum. I have not claimed that. What I said was that it was a fraud. Some have suggested that I have said that the referendum result was a fraud. I never said that the referendum result was a fraud. The fraud was in preventing them from having a decent choice.
Mr Humphries says that I said that our polling showed that people favoured a single electorate with 17 members and a good proportional representative system.
Mr Humphries: Where is the evidence?
MR STEVENSON: One at a time. It does; but, regardless of our polling, who would suggest that, following the electoral system used for 1989 and 1992, for 1995 people should not have a choice of picking the status quo - I do not mean d'Hondt - as the number of electorates? Who would stand up in this place and say that? I am sure that a couple of people would, but I think they should do so for the record.
Mr Humphries mentioned the poll we did. We did a couple of polls. I sent out a number of media releases. I have read out the results before in the Assembly. I am happy to supply the poll sheet and the survey results.
Mr Humphries: What was the question you asked?
MR STEVENSON: The question was mentioned in the last one I showed you; but I am happy to give you more information. I have always said that. I have always said that anyone may come along and look at it. After five years of no-one ever coming along and asking to have a look at any of the surveys, I am giving them out. You have no choice; you are going to cop them whether you like it or not, and you can never say that you did not see them.
Mr Moore brought up another couple of points. He asked, "Why not eight years?". That is a frivolous remark. The question had been answered. He used that as part of another argument, but it has no validity. It was a nonsense. I had read out the results. They were 29 per cent, 34 per cent and 32 per cent. If you go over four years it is going to drop, naturally enough. It is not going to increase; otherwise they would pick the highest, which is four years. I mentioned why I left out "other". It was because they would put "zero". That is because they think this place stinks - and who can blame them?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .