Page 1701 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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profound. It certainly sparked a lot of dialogue as a result, and I think he was spot on. This is all about making it harder for independents to get in. He cites the Tasmanian experience, and I have some knowledge of that. I spent the first part of my political life in the Tasmanian environment and I understand the Hare-Clark system reasonably well. It occurs to me that the arrangements they have in that state could have been put forward and would have provided the necessary precautions against what one might term a frivolous nomination in order to take up a column, because I do not think that any independent groupings that were serious would have much difficulty in getting 100 names. It would obviate the need for the creation of new political parties, which will no doubt pepper the landscape as a result of these changes. I do not think they will make life any easier for the electoral office. I do not think, frankly, that the perceived alarm, concern or threat is of any scope.
It is significant—being in an ungrouped column is a massive disadvantage for a candidate. We ought not try to make it harder for people to be elected to this place. I would love to see more people involved. I find it extraordinarily disappointing that few people are ever in the gallery in this place. A minister in the last federal government said to me only last year that he did not even know where the ACT Assembly was. If I had said to that minister, “I bet you know where the Queensland parliament, the Victorian parliament or the parliament of Western Australia are,” I guarantee he could have told me exactly where they were. He did not even know where this place was. If we do more things to discourage people from becoming involved, we are going to diminish the quality of parliamentary representation in this place.
I hear time and time again from people that this is nothing better than a glorified town council with pretensions. The fact is that we are not held in high regard, in my view, by the prevailing majority of the ACT community, and as long as clever devices like this are employed to make it harder for people to get into what is perceived to be Canberra’s most exclusive club we will ensure that we do not get people of calibre putting themselves forward, because they simply do not respect the institution.
I have said on many occasions in the past 3½ years that I would like to see more done to elevate the perception of this parliament. We run it on a shoestring; we apologise for our raison d’etre here. Some members still seem to be coloured by the pretty strong public opposition to self-government in the ACT. But we have to move on. This ought to be a cutting-edge legislature that is at the front edge of good governance, accountability and transparency.
What we have here is a device by the government to try their level best to make life a little easier after 18 October by discouraging groupings of independents. They cling to the Electoral Commissioner’s report; of course, that Electoral Commissioner’s report contains all sorts of other things that they do not agree with. So when they find something that they agree with, they grab it, and when they do not, they reject it.
When I look at the defamation provisions, the net effect of that report, which I read when it came out some time back, was to say: “It’s all too hard. We’ve never prosecuted anybody so why should we have a provision in there that there can be consequences for slandering candidates and members of parliament?” The fact that
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