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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4377 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

As with any complex issue, there are arguments against four-year terms as well. One of the most serious arguments is that the holding of elections every four years diminishes the level of accountability that the ACT engenders for members of this Assembly. I think that around election time members have a stronger sense of the responsibility they owe to the electorate. They appreciate that they are there at the pleasure of the electorate and can be removed if they make mistakes. I think that constraint weighs less heavily on the minds of members when elections are not imminent or have not just occurred.

That argument has particular relevance in the context of the ACT because - and this is the second argument, in a sense - the ACT has a system of elections, namely the Hare-Clark system, which I think we would all concede is very likely to produce minority governments. The statistical likelihood of governments winning nine seats is very low, and therefore with our system of government in the ACT we are going to face minority governments on a very regular basis, I suspect. Minority governments obviously depend to some extent on the support of members of the crossbenches. They can usually be expected to be opposed by members of the official opposition, but to some extent members of the crossbenches keep minority governments alive. That is, in a sense, the burden that the crossbenches bear in electoral systems such as ours. If there is a particularly unstable minority government in the Territory - and, of course, we have seen some of that calibre - a four-year term will prolong the period of instability that the electorate has to face. That is a particular problem for the ACT. With four-year terms we would find ourselves having to deal with an unsatisfactory state of affairs for longer periods of time.

I would strongly suggest that, had Ms Follett as Chief Minister had the power to go to a Governor, the Governor-General, an Administrator or someone in the middle of 1991, faced as she was with an Assembly of 17 members made up of seven different parties or groupings, she would have been well advised to do so. Perhaps she ought to have had the power to do so. Of course, fixed four-year terms make that impossible, or at least much more difficult. That is a very serious argument against four-year terms.

Another argument is that the proposal for four-year terms is being considered by the Assembly in the absence of a strong ground swell of community opinion about the issue. I suppose it is inevitable that people tend not to express strong support for longer terms for politicians. In fact, they do not usually express anything positive about politicians. In this case I have not been able to discern any great community viewpoint one way or the other. Certainly, no viewpoint has been expressed in favour of longer terms.

I think it is true to say that longer terms can be a disincentive to talented candidates standing for election to parliament, because it extends the period during which they are forced to sit in opposition if their particular party happens to be unsuccessful at an election. We have seen cases - I am thinking mainly of the Federal Parliament - of people you might call high-fliers from outside the parliament being elected to parliament, becoming frustrated in various ways, sometimes by the long periods in opposition, and leaving the parliament, you might say, prematurely because of that problem. That issue is exacerbated when people have to face four-year terms in opposition, rather than three-year terms.

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