Page 2019 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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Canberra and for the diversity of this Assembly, and it is a wasted opportunity to improve representation and improve diversity. Should people continue to say that my agenda is only about defending the interests of the Greens in this debate, I would ask them this question: in supporting a five by five model, whose rights are they defending? The interests, of course, of the Canberra Liberals and the Labor Party.
Over the past few months we have certainly not seen the Canberra Liberals seek to put any justification around this position. They just headed off to a Canberra Liberals branch meeting one evening and locked it in. The Canberra Liberals have not engaged in any kind of public debate about their rationale. They have simply come out saying, “This seems about right.” At least the Labor Party did contribute to public debate and put a submission into the expert reference group in 2013 where they argued their case. It was a little like “pick a number and now figure out how to justify it” but, nevertheless, at least they contributed.
The ALP put the case in their submission to the expert reference group that they wanted to see communities of interest that can be represented by five electorates—multi-member electorates that are small enough to allow effective representation of the community. They argue that communities of interest will be well aligned with electorates and that the five town centres will align with electorates, presumably Belconnen, Tuggeranong, the city, Woden and Gungahlin.
This argument has little validity. Firstly, it takes no account of Molonglo, the suburb or the region, coming online over the next two decades. Secondly, having five electorates will not keep those communities of interest intact once the redistribution is undertaken. The five by five model merely moves the problem around. Currently the community of Gungahlin is split across two electorates, as are parts of Woden. But the expert reference group confirmed in its report that creating five electorates would, and I quote, “almost certainly result in Tuggeranong and Belconnen being split.” So I am not sure how much further ahead we will be in terms of keeping communities of interest together.
Let us look at the possible configurations for increasing the Assembly size in more detail through the lens of the expert reference group. The expert reference group reported back to the Chief Minister at the end of March last year. I would like to take this moment to thank the members of the group for their efforts in putting the review together. They were Mr Phillip Green—the Electoral Commissioner—Ms Anne Cahill Lambert, Emeritus Professor Meredith Edwards, Mr John Hindmarsh and Ms Louise Taylor.
The expert reference group established a number of guiding principles in their analysis and then applied these to the available options for increasing the Assembly size. Two of these principles are entrenched through legislation—namely, the Proportional Representation (Hare-Clark) Entrenchment Act—such as the requirement for at least five members from each electorate, and that there are an odd number of members in each electorate. However, the other two principles were not mandated.
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