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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (17 October) . . Page.. 1751 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

will be well satisfied. Others in the Liberal Party have occasionally gone down the path of protecting the environment, not for the protection of the environment but for their own reasons. The myth of their argument has been exposed as well.

We have provided them with an option. None of them attacked the option, because it overcomes exactly what they complained about earlier in the debate on this issue. There is a taint of hypocrisy. Mr Humphries sits crookedly in his seat because of the chainsaw and the little gun in his pocket. He has the sight set for long distance and a little picture of a kangaroo, but he is not on target on this issue. These amendments are worthy of support because they go to the question of providing information to the community and giving them a choice.

MR KAINE (4.36): Mr Speaker, I appreciate Mr Berry's offer to allow me to vote with him, but I have to tell him that I am not going to take it up. I am not going to take it up because - - -

Mr Berry: Because you have changed your mind.

MR KAINE: No, I have not changed my mind at all. I have listened to the debate. If one were here without any prior knowledge of the subject, one would have to assume from what the Labor Party has said that they are not going to be able to tell people how to vote. Nothing is further from the truth. All this Bill says is that you cannot do it on polling day within 100 metres of a polling booth. If the election campaign goes on for three months or more, as the last one did, you can tell them for three months how to do it. You can stick the information in their letterboxes; you can put it in the newspaper; you can drop it from an aeroplane; you can throw pamphlets from Black Mountain; you can do what you like. You can tell your voters what you like for as long as you like, except that you just cannot do it on polling day at the polling booth.

What is the problem? If, after you have inundated your voters for three months or more with how-to-vote information, they wake up at 8 o'clock in the morning on polling day and say, "I do not know how to vote", they can always pick up the phone and call the Labor Party and ask them. On their way to the polling booth they can switch on their mobile and say, "Hey, Wayne, how do I vote when I get there?", or they can ask Terry. They would get better information from Terry, I am sure. This assertion that somehow we are depriving the Labor Party of the opportunity of telling their voters how to vote is another one of the great lies that emerge in debate in this place. It is not true. I do not accept the Opposition's argument.

If I cannot read the paper on the day before polling day, cut out the how-to-vote information, stick it in my pocket and go down to the polling booth the next day and vote the way Wayne tells me to, then we have a problem. I do not believe that the average voter is so dumb. In fact, I know that they are not, because they voted properly at the last election. They did not have any how-to-vote cards from our party telling them in which order to vote for candidates, but they picked the right ones. That is why I am here and Harold is here. The whole argument of the Labor Party relies on a couple of myths.

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