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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4911 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

alarmed when I saw this coming out as if it were a direction from the National Capital Futures Conference and therefore a very definitive statement with a lot of weight behind it. I was at the forum where the idea came up, and I was not overly impressed by how the forum was run or even sure whether a review was representative of the views within that very small group, let alone the desire of the community.

However, I do think there are merits in having a review such as this. While I did express concern initially about it coming out of the National Capital Futures Conference, when I heard that Labor was being totally oppositional to the whole idea I also said that I was concerned that people should be asked to put in a lot of time and effort to make submissions to this review if the whole thing was going to be dropped in the next Assembly, if Labor had the numbers to do that. I was concerned that it could be a waste of time for the community and for people in this Assembly.

We wrote to Mrs Carnell expressing views about the terms of reference. One of them, as Mrs Carnell said, was that the Hare-Clark system should not be part of the terms of reference. Our reason was that the Hare-Clark system had been agreed to at an ACT referendum and that not enough time had passed since. I would suggest that you need to let 10 years pass before you can evaluate a voting system. It was too early to look at that. I am not saying that it should never be looked at again, although of course I am a very strong supporter of the system, because I believe its proportional nature provides for a much greater range of political interests to have a chance of achieving representation in the Assembly than other voting systems would allow. This enhances the democratic nature of ACT self-government, which we believe must be a very important goal.

We are a unicameral system. We work very well with a minority government in terms of accountability and the way the crossbench is able to work with either of the older parties. I heard Mr Berry spouting off about the Liberal-Green-Independent alliance. I guess we can look forward to this for the next few months. It is a fairly predictable negative campaign. We have already heard it mooted by Labor itself that this is how they want to do it. I guess that we just have to keep pointing out that we have looked at issues on their merit as they have arisen. We have voted with Liberal and Labor pretty well equally, if you look at the figures. If you look at the number of divisions called, that may not be absolutely clear. You would have to look at the issues being voted on. As we have pointed out, on very significant issues in this town, especially planning, we have seen Labor and Liberal voting together against the crossbench. Our challenge is to counter the misinformation that no doubt Labor is going to be consistently pushing out. Because they do not have any positive ideas of their own, they will try a negative campaign.

Another comment we made to Mrs Carnell about the terms of reference, which she did not pick up, was that we wanted to see the working party expanded to include greater community representation. Another comment we made was that the terms of reference should specifically note that the review should examine and report on mechanisms to more effectively involve all Assembly members in the governance of the Territory. In her response, Mrs Carnell felt that this was actually dealt with in the terms of reference where they say:

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