Page 4824 - Week 15 - Thursday, 8 December 1994
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To sum up, the Government is concerned at the haste with which this Bill has been drafted and at the apparent omissions, additions and technical errors that it contains. The Government is also concerned about the legal doubt as to the effectiveness of the proposed method of entrenching various "principles" of our electoral system. However, we are not opposed to it in principle. If it is the wish of the majority of the Assembly to proceed with the Bill, then the Government would want to see the Bill amended to correct, as far as possible, those technical errors that have been identified. In addition, the Government will seek to amend the Bill to entrench two further elements of the ACT's electoral system that we see as fundamental and that were included in the Hare-Clark referendum options description sheet. Those two issues are compulsory voting and the current size of the Assembly. I do not support any move to increase the size of the Assembly without a specific referendum and a specific decision by the electors of the ACT.
MR MOORE (4.00): Madam Speaker, it is easy for the Chief Minister to stand up and say that she does not support an increase in the size of the Assembly, because there is no doubt that an increase would be to Labor's disadvantage. If we had three seven-member electorates, it would be even more difficult for Labor to get a majority than it is under the current system. So, to that extent, it is clearly in Labor's interests to ensure that we contain the number of members to 17. Madam Speaker, I feel quite comfortable about standing up and saying this, because there is no personal advantage to me in it. I am already in a seven-member electorate. It would make no difference to me, personally. That being the case, I will be very interested to see how the amendments go and, in particular, how Labor responds to this entrenching system. We must not forget the Chief Minister's resistance to the suggestion that her above-the-line voting system ought not to be part of it because, clearly, it undermined the whole referendum system. For the Chief Minister now to take the high moral ground, when her credibility on that point was severely questioned by many commentators - not the least of them being Geoff Pryor in the Canberra Times - is a most extraordinary thing.
Madam Speaker, what is also interesting is how difficult it is to ensure that the result of a referendum concerning 17 members is binding on the Assembly, because I believe that it cannot be binding. The number of members of the Assembly is actually 17, according to the self-government Act. To change that, it requires a Federal Minister to respond to a resolution of the Assembly. I think there is a real question about whether a referendum can actually change that result. So, Madam Speaker, for those two reasons I have some unease about the amendment that Ms Follett proposes to this Bill.
Ms Follett proposes a further amendment, in relation to compulsory voting. I have always been a supporter of compulsory voting, in the sense in which we use the term. In fact, Madam Speaker, I think most of us are aware that we actually have compulsory attendance. Once somebody is handed a ballot paper, if they do not want to vote, nobody can do anything about what happens. Secretly, they can rip up their paper or they can write "abolish it" across the paper, as many did at the last election and as even more did at the election before that. Some of them even ticked a box that had "abolish" on it - more than 7 per cent did, I think.
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