Page 2020 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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The first of these was having an odd number of members in the parliament. This seems somewhat essential, especially as the Speaker currently uses their vote. The final guiding principle was that electorates should return the same number of members. This is not mandated anywhere and, of course, it is in actual fact the situation that we have had different sized electorates since 1995 when the Hare-Clark electoral system commenced here in the ACT. On the number of members in each electorate, the expert reference group said:
… the ERG concludes that 7 member electorates are preferable to either 5 or 9 member electorates as a general rule. However, as the overall size of the Assembly is also of paramount consideration, the ERG accepts that both 5 member and 9 member electorates are viable options to consider.
On the total number of members, the expert reference group were also clear that they thought 25 was the absolute minimum size that the Assembly should be increased to. There is, of course, also the fact that the expert reference group saw that as an interim step. They did say that they thought the Assembly should increase to 35, and they put some particular time frames on that. I think that is an issue that future assemblies need to consider. The electoral matters committee that I was just a member of has actually written a recommendation that puts a population trigger on that so that there is, I guess, a natural triggering of that debate at a certain point in time which keeps the politics out of it and enables an objective review to be undertaken. I think that is a positive way to proceed; rather than locking in a date now, simply ensuring that we discuss the matter in future.
If we go back to the comments that the expert reference group was making, given all these constraints delivered through the guiding principles, and a belief that an increase to at least 25 was required, options were somewhat limited. The expert reference group recommended an interim Assembly size of five by five electorates or an interim number of three by nine. But if one was not so rigid about having electorates with different numbers of members, there were definitely other options that could have been undertaken. We could have had 23 members, which could be two seven-member electorates and one nine-member electorate and then the electorates could have stayed broadly in the same regions as they currently are.
Twenty-five could have been two by nine plus one by seven or we could have gone to 27 members, which could have been three by nine, which was the expert reference group’s second option. So we could have had a more modest increase in the size of the Assembly and at least two of our electorates would have had an ideal number of members—that is, seven members; and it was the expert reference group that identified seven as the ideal number—or we could have had the same number of members with increased diversity.
The expert reference group, in its recommendations for a transitional size of the Assembly, landed in a less than ideal place, and acknowledges as much. This is in part perhaps due to the rules that it has set itself. It would do the Assembly good too to recognise that, while the need for an increase in the size of the Assembly is agreed by all in this place, we are disagreeing today on the details of how to engineer a less than perfect solution in what may end up being a transitional arrangement.
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