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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (27 November) . . Page.. 4804 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

The ACT electorate tends not to confuse Commonwealth and local issues. I wonder how many electorates around Australia do. It is pretty obvious that they do not, given that all current state governments are Labor and we have a federal Liberal government. I can recall a time when virtually all the state governments were Liberal and we had a federal Labor government. At the first lot of ministerial meetings I attended, that was indeed the case, except for Queensland. They seemed to fight very much with the federal Labor government. That was an interesting meeting.

Australian electorates generally tend to be able to discern those types of issues. Nevertheless, it is a plus that we will not be clashing with federal elections. There is always a danger, though, that the federal election could land on the same day as the ACT Legislative Assembly election, which would cause problems.

In fact, Malcolm Mackerras, who appeared before our committee, suggested that the next federal election would be on 16 October. That would tend to interfere with our election because it would move it out to December. Mr Mackerras may well be wrong on that one, but it was an interesting prediction. We will overcome that problem. People from the business community who appeared before the committee indicated that a four-year term is better for business confidence because businesses can plan with more certainty. That is a strong point as well.

The traditional wisdom of a three-year term is that governments are feeling their way for the first year; they get a substantive amount of work done in the second year-you would not really know with this lot; they are a bit slow-and in the third year everyone is back into election mode. That probably does not make for ideal government.

I have always thought, from looking around the world and from what occurred in the United Kingdom, that five-year terms are a little too long-although they are not fixed terms. Five years is a very long period of time. Four years seems to be the norm not only in Australia but also in a number of other countries. Four years is a reasonable period of time-it is not too long. In terms of conventional wisdom, a new government can find its feet in the first year; it can get on with the business of government for the next two years and, in the last year, go through the normal electoral shenanigans that occur in any democratic system.

There is a cost saving as well. It is a relatively minor cost saving; nevertheless, it is there. The Chief Minister indicated-and it was replicated by our committee-that there had been a number of studies and inquiries into this issue. In his speech he mentioned that there have been about four over the last five years. There has been considerable community consultation throughout that process.

It is not something that we as a committee found excited great passion in the community with lots of people wanting to see us. Out of 40 groups or people asked, only about 22 either sent in submissions or appeared. As a result of all those studies, there was a fair volume of evidence indicating strong support in the community for four-year terms. Anecdotally, from talking to people over the years and finding out what they think about this issue, I have noticed a preference for four-year terms over three or five-year terms.

I believe this is a move that will be accepted and will probably be preferred by the ACT community. In fact, we had a term of three years and eight months, between February

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