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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (17 October) . . Page.. 1699 ..

Mr Humphries: But you do all those things as well. You do not save any money.

MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, if you wish to give him the floor, the time will come.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Humphries will have the opportunity to respond in due course. Proceed, Ms Follett.

MS FOLLETT: Mr Humphries also referred to "a reduction in the incidence of complaints lodged about campaign literature". The ACT Electoral Commission told the Estimates Committee that in the commission's survey less than one per cent of voters complained about how-to-vote cards. Mr Humphries proposes a solution to a problem that does not actually exist. If the candidates adopt the tactics of the Liberals' own Mr Dunne as an alternative, then I am quite sure that complaints will go up markedly, not down.

Mr Humphries gave as another of his reasons "removing the advantage currently enjoyed by those parties and candidates with the resources to print and distribute material widely on polling day". The big parties - and I will include here the Moore Independents and the Green Party of Australia - do have this capacity, but they also have the capacity to do this before election day. Mr Humphries's ban means that that is now their only option. It will be the others who fail to gather such resources - the individual candidates, the small parties, the new candidates and so on. They will not be able to gather these resources, because no longer will they be able to access the maximum number of voters with the minimum number of volunteers. That is possible only at polling booths on election day, as Mr Humphries well knows. Last, and probably least, of Mr Humphries's arguments was his reference to "removing a source of irritation to voters entering polling places". As I said, Mr Speaker, the Electoral Commissioner, who has actually surveyed people on this issue, found that less than one per cent of voters were dissatisfied with how-to-vote cards.

Mr Humphries, in his introduction speech, did not make much of the environmental argument, for he well knows that his ban on the handing out of how-to-vote cards at polling booths on election day will actually result in more paper wastage, not less. More how-to-vote cards and other election literature will be printed for candidates to get coverage. More will be put into letterboxes by party workers and campaign sympathisers. More material will be handed out at shopping centres and other community gathering points. Perhaps, like the Liberals' own Mr Dunne, individual candidates will put leaflets on windscreens at parking places at churches, shopping centres, workplaces and so on. More of that material will end up as landfill, not in recycling bins. More of it will end up lying around the streets of Canberra because of its widespread circulation. With the current usage of how-to-vote cards, we have the capacity to reduce, reuse and recycle, because that usage is confined to polling booths on election day.

Mr Speaker, before I finish, I would like to make one point about how-to-vote cards on social justice grounds. The Australian Labor Party has always provided translations in a number of community languages on its how-to-vote cards. This ensures that voters whose first language is not English can have assistance. Also, those who are not particularly literate or numerate can seek out a booth worker to provide them with a how-to-vote card for the party or the candidate they wish to support. These options

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