Page 5115 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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were probably a good idea. A group of volunteers from across all parties and a number of interested groups in the ACT—every political party in the ACT except the ALP—on a very small budget—I think $10,000—managed to turn the tide of opinion so that when the votes were cast, 72 per cent of the formal votes at the referendum were in favour of Hare-Clark. I think that is a significant achievement.
After 1995 we moved to entrench the key elements of Hare-Clark, because we did not want any organisation or grouping by itself to tamper with what we in the ACT considered to be a very effective electoral system which protects voters. The move towards entrenchment in 1995 came because, after the successful passage of the referendum in 2009 when the government of the day, headed by Rosemary Follett, introduced the first attempt to legislate to bring that into effect, the government of the day basically attempted to circumvent the measures of the Hare-Clark system by introducing an above the line voting system, which was not part of the referendum.
There were members of the community—I pay tribute to the members of the Proportional Representation Society and to former member Michael Moore, who introduced the private member’s bill to bring about the entrenchment—who thought something had to be done to ensure that the Labor Party or any other party could not fiddle with the electoral system. That is why we have the key elements of Hare-Clark entrenched today.
The committee took its responsibilities in considering these bills very seriously, and the bills seek to do a number of things. The Electoral Legislation Amendment Bill contains clauses that would lower the age of provisional enrolment for electors from 17 to 16 years, limit the number of candidates that may be nominated for an election in an electorate to no more than the number of vacancies, provide for the way candidates’ deposits are returned, allow the Electoral Commission to provide an extract of electors to candidates in an electronic form, ensure that the certified list of electors used in polling places contain gender and date of birth so it would be harder to vote fraudulently, remove the requirements for a witness for the voter who is casting a postal vote, provide flexibility to the Electoral Commission about declaration votes, and make consequential amendments to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body.
The members of the committee unanimously agreed that the Electoral Legislation Amendment Bill should be adopted with the exception of the provisions that would limit the number of candidates that may be nominated for an election in an electorate to no more than the number of vacancies. The committee took the view that it was not for the Assembly to impinge on people’s right to stand for election.
More contentious was the Electoral (Casual Vacancies) Amendment Bill, which proposes amendments to alter the countback process where members of the Legislative Assembly vacate their seats before the end of the Assembly. In brief, the amendments would allow the Assembly to appoint a person of the same political party where there was no unsuccessful candidate for that party available from the previous election or to appoint an independent in the place of a vacating independent member. This would extend the present processes set up in section 195 of the Electoral Act for the Assembly to appoint a new member if the countback process was unable to
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