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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Wednesday, 31 March 2004) . . Page.. 1451 ..

A campaign to encourage secondary schools to use the Commission’s services to elect members to the Student Representative Council using the Hare-Clark system is undertaken on an annual basis.

Mr Hargreaves: Why don’t you just table it, Bill? Table the letter, mate!

MR STEFANIAK: I will in a second. It goes on:

In 2003 a series of documents was made available on the website to guide teachers through the electoral process should they want to run their own school elections. The Commission regularly assists schools with the conduct of their Student Representative Council elections.

I will take Mr Hargreaves up on his offer. There are also the headings “Professional development for teachers”, “Units of work”, “Constitutional Convention” and “Election roll close advertising”. I will take up his offer and table that letter. I seek leave to table the letter.

Leave granted.

MR STEFANIAK: I table the letter.

MR SPEAKER: You could have saved us a bit of trouble.

Mr Cornwell: We’ve all got one.

MR STEFANIAK: You have all got one. Okay.

Mr Hargreaves: You could have done it a bit earlier because we’ve all read it!

MR STEFANIAK: All right. I think it is important. It just shows you, Mr Hargreaves, that a lot is occurring already. At times I wonder how much more you can do, but I think you raise some interesting points. If civics education can be improved and if you want to refer that to the curriculum review team just to see if something more about this could be put in, we have no problem with that. People’s democratic rights are fundamental, and the right to vote is the most fundamental right of all. That is quite important, and they are reasonably good suggestions. Let’s see if we can improve it further. We may not be able to improve it much, but let’s give it a go because it is important.

I will listen with interest to what Ms Dundas has to say. I would like to hear what she says about young people having fewer opportunities to enrol. That may well be so, and I have a fair bit of sympathy in relation to her first proposed new paragraph. It seems to extend what Mr Hargreaves already has. I am interested to hear what she says in relation to the second and third paragraphs.

Whilst I do not have great problems with the Electoral Commission further increasing its role of getting young people to enrol—and even doing research—I am a little bit wary of supporting something that calls for additional funding. Having been in government and appreciating the tightness of budgets, I wonder whether that is necessary. Mr Hargreaves does not do that. This can be improved without spending a lot of money.

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