Page 2030 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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MR HANSON (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (5.27): I must say that we are dealing with these bills in an odd way today, because now that we have decided that we are going to have five electorates of five, we have to make the decision to actually create an expanded Assembly. I will not repeat all of my comments from the discussion on the previous bill because, in essence, as the Chief Minister said, much of our discussion is, if not cognate, certainly relevant to both bills. But it is appropriate that I respond to some of the comments made by Mr Rattenbury in relation to the previous matter.
The point I would make is that five electorates is an appropriate balance to make sure that, by and large, communities of interest are represented. There is no perfect way to do that, but I think five is the best compromise. Electorates of five members do provide for fair proportional representation and an appropriate balance between representing communities of interest and representative democracy. I think that Mr Coe, in his colourful speech on the last bill, and also Mr Corbell, outlined that pretty clearly for us.
The expert reference group made the point that the overall size of the Assembly is of “paramount consideration”—and that is a quote from their report—when considering the size of electorates. The point—and this was my point earlier about determining the size of the Assembly and about which bill we should deal with first—is that we should look at what size this Assembly needs to be and make sure that it is no bigger than it needs to be but that it is adequate to have the economies of scale to fix some of those problems we have identified. And there is a consensus that 25 at this stage is the right number. That was the number put forward by the expert reference group. It is the number that has been agreed to by the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.
Mr Rattenbury’s approach seems to be different from the advice of the expert reference group, which said that the paramount consideration is how big this place needs to be. What Mr Rattenbury is trying to do is reverse engineering. What he is trying to say is, “What’s the optimal number to get Greens elected and then let’s retrofit that to the size of the Assembly.” So he is not really concerned about spending the extra money on MLAs that we do not need and he is not particularly concerned about not having enough MLAs and only having 21, which would not do the job, so long as he gets his optimal number.
So I am disappointed. I would have to say that, whilst we have worked together on this bill cooperatively between the parties to come up with a good solution for the people of the ACT, compromises have been made all round. It would be fair to say that members of the Liberal Party had some scepticism about this. We end up with Mr Rattenbury, in essence, trying to make a claim here about proportional representation, which is clearly seen by everybody for what it is, which is self-interest rather than community interest.
That said, we can probably mark 5 August 2014 as the most harmonious day that we have seen in the Assembly for a good while. I think it is a day about which we can all rightly be proud as a day when we worked together to achieve a good outcome for the people of the ACT in making this Assembly a more effective place.
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