Page 4748 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 7 December 1994
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Many people would be aware, because it was passed around to us as part of a meeting here, of a comment by Professor Perry Shapiro, a professor of economics at the University of California and adjunct professor at the Federalism Research Centre at the ANU, which was reported in Constitutional Centenary, October 1994. The article says:
Professor Shapiro argued that the California experience with CIR should give Australians some pause in their enthusiasm for adopting the process.
That is exactly what we have recommended. The article goes on to say:
A popularly initiated constitutional amendment has become a product like soap or automobiles.
He then talks about the failure rate and so forth. It is my intention today to draw attention to some of the problems associated with CIR. That is not to say that I think that it is impossible. Some of the problems that I am going to refer to are from the Californian experience. Whenever we extrapolate experience from one place to another, particularly from one nation to another, we have to realise that they are actions that are taken in a different social context. Nevertheless, it would be crazy for us to ignore the experience of other places that have CIR. When I was in the United States recently, I was in a group of people who were talking about an initiative that was going to be put up in California to do with waiving any fine or penalty for people who are using medicinal cannabis. A Californian psychiatrist, who was sitting in the group, began to berate the CIR system. I sat down with them and had a quite long discussion which resulted in his recommending to me an article that appeared in Harper's Magazine. It is a very well respected magazine.
I then came back here. Using our good library facilities - once again, it is a good opportunity to commend our library for its efficiency and help, as I am sure all members would agree - I have been able to put my hands on a copy of a 1994 report by Peter Schrag called "California's Elected Anarchy: A government destroyed by popular referendum". I will quote bits and pieces, Madam Speaker; but at the same time I want you to understand that what I am doing is putting the other side of the argument and saying that these are the sorts of problems that we still have to deal with, these are the problems that we have to know how to resolve. The article begins by talking about the image of California. It states:
By now the image of California in decline looms as large in the conventional media wisdom as the Golden State - triumphant cliches of a generation ago - "this El Dorado", as Time magazine had put it in 1969 ...
In the next paragraph it states:
Today, California classrooms are among the most crowded in the country; many schools operate without libraries, without counsellors, without nurses, without art or music, with greatly diminished curricular offerings.
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