Page 648 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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good election result for Labor and that it won 50 per cent of the popular vote in the election.
It would deserve, of course, under those circumstances to form the government. But it would get not just a government that it would be able to form in the Assembly with a majority of seats; it would clearly get all the seats in the Assembly. There would be no opposition. There would be no need for this Assembly to meet because all the seats would be occupied by Labor members.
Mr Kaine: Then the factions would take over.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. It would be a question of - - -
A member: I will tell you what - we have a couple of factions, but not a full one.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed, this would be a Labor caucus meeting, and that would not be conducive to good government. So, when the Chief Minister says that a simple and plain electoral system is the key to effective and accountable government, I ask her to refer to places like Singapore or South Africa or even, if you like, Queensland, where the weakness of the opposition parties, by their inability to make headway against the Government, has resulted in poor government, in bad government, in authoritarian government, and that is not what the ACT needs.
We need two things: we need a system which provides for reasonably stable government, and for that reason I would not support a system which creates no possibilities of parties other than two major parties getting seats; and we also need a system which provides for changes of government where the majority party, the government party, falls somewhere below 50 per cent of the vote. If you have a system which provides both those things you have a reasonably good system, and I submit that single-member electorates would not do that.
I come back to a couple of points raised earlier in the debate. There was discussion about how one would improve the system of counting for the ACT. As I have indicated, although I do not fully support the d'Hondt system, I think that there are other directions in which we could go which would be infinitely worse than that. I think that, to some extent, the d'Hondt system has had a fairly bad press. Although it certainly was a hellishly complex system, it did, to some extent, reflect a fair amount of the state of mind of the ACT electorate, although it took a long time to reach that point of view. So, I would certainly say that it was superior to the result in the Tasmanian election, for example, where you would not say that the result really reflected the state of mind of the electorate.
But going back to the question of how to improve and expedite the count, I would honestly suggest that the
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