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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (23 August) . . Page.. 3280 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

In particular, they should be able to contest such decision-making effectively. There should be civil and institutional arrangements in place which ensure that the challenges are judged by almost everyone's criteria in a relatively impartial way.

Contestability is the second element of a vital democracy. Contestability is promoted and practised by a variety of institutional arrangements, all of them subject to possible amendments and additions, all of them dependent on a reasonable level of social welfare and education. A well-designed constitution or a bill of rights ensures that governments cannot do the sorts of things that it certainly would be reasonable for various groups to contest.

A free press-Mr Stanhope quoted from this earlier-an independent broadcaster and an active citizenry help to ensure that people are aware when the government does take questionable initiatives, perhaps trampling on their interests. And the institutions of representative government, the courts and other less formal tribunals and channels of appeal help to make it possible for people to have their complaints heard.

Allowing citizen-initiated referenda would directly undermine these institutions of democratic contestability. It would make it easier for individuals who happen to belong to a majority on some issue to mobilise others in that majority and to force their view, at whatever costs to the interest of the minority. It may sometimes be advisable for a government to decide on recourse to a plebiscite, though such a decision should always remain contestable; but it should not be possible for individuals to trigger such a devastatingly final dictate. I will come back to why it is such a devastatingly final dictate, why it has a much stronger moral power than, say, a piece of legislation that passes through the Assembly.

Legislating for citizen-initiated referenda would expose anyone with minority characteristics to the wayward electoral will of their fellows. And it is important to remember that all of us, in some respect, are in a minority. We may hold different religious beliefs from the majority; we may identify with a minority ethnic group; we may accept minority views on any of a variety of issues; or we may just have minority interests and tastes. We may want our children to have a secular or religious education; we may like keeping dogs; we may like riding a bicycle in town; we may have invested in an open fire.

If you are in a minority in any such dimension, then the availability of the citizen-initiated referendum would mean that you are now vulnerable to a new form of incontestable decision-making. You can hope and pray that someone in the majority does not succeed in mobilising majoritarian feeling against you. This is an aspect under which the government is entirely free of control by you and your ilk. You are no better off than the subjects of an arbitrary monarch or a dictator. In fact, you are worse off, because it carries-and I will come back to it-the morality of a majority.

If the idea of allowing citizen-initiated referenda has appealed in recent years, that can only be because it seems to go well with democratic sentiments. On the surface, it does seem to go well. After all, the dangers of the initiative are well known: it can lead to inconsistent decision-making, foster the influence of temporary passion or fashion, offer an opening for cranks and those with bees in their bonnets, and so on. But what we now

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