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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2919 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

as the antidote to a weakness in the concept of representative government. The weakness is the inability of representative government to satisfy growing expectations of its citizens for a real say in the governing of the community.

There is what some have called a democratic deficit in Australian communities today. This deficit is especially clear in Canberra. We have the highest disposable income, the highest educational attainment, the highest proportion of public servants, people for whom therefore there is little mystery in the working of government, and the highest use of the internet. All of those things put people in a position where it can only be a matter of time before they demand not only to be observers but also to participate in major decision-making affecting them. A symptom of that dissatisfaction, I think, is a high level of turnover of governments and members, more so than was the case 30 years ago.

I think the delegate model of government, whereby electors choose a representative and take no further part in decision-making for three or four years from that decision, is showing distinct signs of wear and tear. In practice, electors rarely know what their delegate personally believes. The party that he or she belongs to can change its policy, and in government that is often the case. Indeed, delegates can abandon their party or their party can abandon them. The problem is compounded as the volume and quantity of information about those delegates in the media and elsewhere, such as the internet, grow.

A response to this growing divide has been the proliferation of opinion-testing mechanisms-from opinion polls through to community consultation exercises. A couple of years ago, the then ACT government did a stocktake of the number of exercises in community consultation then under way. The number of such exercises exceeded 120. My opinion is that such exercises on occasions can only serve to emphasise the gap between the views of the governed and the views of the governors.

Mr Speaker, the process has been carefully thought out in this bill and addresses the previously expressed objections to the machinery of community referenda. I assure members that no matter will be brought forward in haste under this legislation. At least six months must elapse from the initiation of an idea within the community to its manifestation in a referendum. Referenda would generally be held in conjunction with general elections for the Legislative Assembly, so costs would be kept to a minimum.

There is no way that the electorate would be required to vote on any old hare-brained scheme that an individual elector might think up. First of all, all ideas would require a committee to propose the initiative. That committee must gain initial support for the proposal from at least 1,000 electors before it can be registered. It must then receive the support of 5 per cent of them-at the present time, about 10,000 electors-to become a formal initiative. That would be a significant hurdle, as anyone who has ever sought to garner signatures on a petition would know. In fact, it has only been on four or five, maybe six, occasions in the life of this Assembly, the last 13 years of this Assembly's life, that petitions in excess of 10,000 names have been tabled in this place.

Another safeguard is that, before a proposal can be registered, the Electoral Commissioner must ensure that it is within the power of the Legislative Assembly to make such a proposal law and it cannot interfere with the budget by proposing or prohibiting the expenditure of specific amounts of public money for particular purposes. In effect, appropriation bills cannot be passed by this process. Also, this bill demands

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