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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (23 August) . . Page.. 3288 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

New Zealand, and has been used at a number of levels in a number of other countries such as Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere. It is an idea that has had a long Australian base of support as well. For most of last century the Australian Labor Party had a position on its platform in support of CIR.

I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is why, in the beginning of the 21st century, would we be coming back to an issue like citizen-initiated referendum? What is the argument for the need in our democratic process for this to happen now?

I think it is worth reflecting for a moment on the way in which our system of government has evolved. Democracy in its post-ancient manifestation developed principally in the United Kingdom, in England, during the Middle Ages. Gradually the idea of parliamentary democracy became a concept which was exported eventually to other parts of the world. Today a very large proportion of the world uses a Westminster style of parliamentary representative democracy.

The idea of everybody taking part in decision-making was not exactly the concept that gave rise originally to democracies or to parliaments being set up. The idea was that power elites would be able to take part in decision-making in conjunction with the rulers of the day, generally the king or the queen. As those concepts of participation took off and there was involvement by parliaments, generally of ruling elites, people with money and power and land, gradually the franchise for those parliaments over succeeding generations widened, particularly in the 19th century, and the idea of a true democracy, the idea of everybody over a certain age being entitled to cast a vote and to influence the results of these parliamentary elections, became commonplace.

In each of those iterations in the democratic or parliamentary experience the idea was that people would be chosen as representatives who would make the decisions that affected the future of the community. It would not be individuals directly deciding. The community would not directly decide; it would be done through representatives. The reason is obvious: that those sorts of systems of government, those sorts of communities, were far too large and far too spread out to be even remotely capable of being able to come together at any one time or in one place to make a decision. The idea which had existed in a form in places like ancient Athens, where all the citizens could come together in one place to make a decision, or at least all the male free citizens could come together in one place to make a decision, obviously was never going to work in much larger communities.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, the question is whether those inhibitions which led to representative democracy being the best form of government still really apply in this day and age. We live in a society where citizens have an unprecedented level of education. People today almost universally have finished at least secondary schooling, and a large proportion in this community, for example, enjoy tertiary qualifications or post-secondary qualifications.

People are affluent. They have a large measure of free time, leisure time. People have the time to peruse newspapers, watch television broadcasts of the news, peruse magazines, be involved in decisions or processes which lead to debate on particular community problems or issues, such as being involved in representative organisations like P&C councils, or LAPACs, or community organisations of one sort or another.

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