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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 2071 ..

election. I don’t support the later transitional provision that would mean that there would be no cut-off date applied to the 2004 election.

As the Electoral Commission has pointed, out the current situation gives rise to considerable uncertainty as there is no fixed date for applying for party registration. There are several statutory deadlines that apply for objection periods and so on, but it is not possible under the Electoral Act at present to state that applications for party registration must be made by a particular date. The Electoral Commissioner has quite rightly recommended that this should be corrected to put certainty into this process. For these reasons, the government opposes the amendment.

MS DUNDAS (11.26): This has been a very interesting debate and I think it goes to the heart of the process of making laws here in the ACT where we do have something that is significant in terms of our democratic process, being the Electoral Amendment Bill tabled in May 2003 and being debated a year later in May 2004.

Amendments were still being circulated in the past 24 hours in relation to this bill. As we are making significant changes to the Electoral Act it impacts on people wishing to participate in those elections, which is why I think that we should actually seriously consider changing the date on which certain actions cannot be taken.

I note the very strong arguments put forward by Ms Tucker and Mr Stanhope in relation to the actual time needed to consider these applications and how that impacts, and it may be, if this amendment were to be successful, that we should have been looking at all of those time periods and actually trying to make them fit. But it does raise a really important point about what impact the passing of these amendments to the electoral laws in the ACT will actually have on the community and those people wishing to participate in the democratic system. Maybe we need to make sure that the Electoral Commission is resourced well enough to make sure that these changes are communicated to the electorate, to people who are wishing to participate in the election in October.

Amendment negatived.

MR STANHOPE (Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Environment and Minister for Community Affairs) (11.28): Mr Speaker, I move amendment No 2 circulated in my name and present a supplementary statement to the amendments [see schedule 4 at page 2125].

This amendment makes a range of changes to the Electoral Amendment Bill and is intended to remove all references to ballot groups from the Electoral Act. Under the Electoral Act as it currently stands, a ballot group is an entity that can be registered by a member of the Legislative Assembly who is not a member of a registered political party. A registered ballot group is able to nominate candidates for election to the Assembly, with candidates identified on the ballot paper by printing the ballot group’s registered name or abbreviation. Like registered political parties, registered ballot groups also have rights and obligations under the funding and disclosure scheme. These include the right to receive public funding according to the votes received by the ballot group’s candidates and the obligation to submit disclosure returns detailing receipts, expenditure and debts. The ballot group provisions were included in the Electoral Act before the 2001 election as part of a reform of the party registration scheme that saw the abolition of the concept

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