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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4645 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

necessarily naturally occur. Wedge politics was a trademark of the recent American presidential campaign run by the American Republicans. It is characteristic, too, of the politics conducted by the Californian Republicans, resulting in the endless referenda attacking minority rights. It has also in recent times become a well-known trademark of the Howard Government.

By attacking the rights of perceived minority groups such as gays, women, migrants and Aboriginals, conservative political parties are able to galvanise support for their own agendas from unlikely quarters. Such an example, Mr Speaker, which I observed at first hand when I was in the United States last year, is the way the Californian Republicans have galvanised the support of low-income Anglo-Saxon workers against the Latino population of California and have sought to blame them for the problems being experienced by low-income white workers.

Mr Speaker, that approach, with endless referenda attacking the rights of migrants within California, has been used by the Republicans as a way of dividing the community and getting voters who might otherwise be Democrat voters to shift their votes across to the Republican Party, based on the politics of division around racist issues. This is the politics of division. It is the kind of politics which is currently wreaking havoc in the Australian political environment. By creating such political tools, the conservative side of politics is splintering and ultimately undermining the concept not only of representative democracy but of democracy itself.

The Assembly has shown that it is capable of accommodating a diversity of views, as evidenced by the election to the Assembly of Mr Moore, Mr Osborne and the Greens, as well as the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. The diversity of their views ensures that decisions made in this place are, in fact, in line with community opinion, by and large. Some of the issues that the Assembly has debated are euthanasia, drug laws, heroin trials and guns.

Mr Speaker, these are the issues at the cutting edge of debate within the community, and this Assembly has shown that it is more than capable of dealing with these things. These issues are regarded by the community as controversial and fundamental to the way in which our children are brought up and the kind of society in which we live. The point is that the Assembly has debated these issues and the diverse range of community views has been represented, without the need for a citizen- or community-initiated referendum to force these issues onto the public agenda and without the need for a citizen- or community-initiated referendum to overcome any kind of obstacle within this place to these issues being debated.

Citizens already have a number of avenues in the parliamentary system through which they can express their views to members and the Assembly - and, when viewed as appropriate, they do take these opportunities: The Territory elections themselves, of course; petitions; the ability to make submissions to committees and appear before committees to provide evidence; the ability to lobby MLAs; and even the ability to make corrections in Hansard if they believe that their views have been misrepresented.

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