Page 3242 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 September 1993
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PARKINSON'S DISEASE AWARENESS WEEK
Ministerial Statement
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport): Madam Speaker, I seek leave to incorporate in Hansard a ministerial statement on Parkinson's Disease Awareness Week.
Leave granted.
Document incorporated at Appendix 4.
HARE-CLARK ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Paper
MR HUMPHRIES: I seek leave to table the final report of the Working Party on the Implementation of a Hare-Clark Electoral System in the Assembly, and to make a short statement.
Leave granted.
MR HUMPHRIES: I thank members for their generosity. I will be very brief. Madam Speaker, I table the final report of the Working Party on the Implementation of a Hare-Clark Electoral System. Members will recall that this working party was set up in June last year to begin work on advising the community - and the Assembly, I suppose - about the details of how the Hare-Clark system might operate in the ACT. That was a system which had overwhelming support from the electors of the ACT at the 1992 referendum.
There was much detail to be worked out about the way in which the system, which has its origins in a sense in Tasmania, would be implemented in the ACT. The report which I have tabled today represents more than a year's work towards that goal. This paper offers guidance, not just to the broad community but specifically to the Government, about the important issues which will have to be dealt with in the context of the electoral system. If legislation which results in due course in this Assembly follows suggestions made here, I believe that it will be fair and workable and will provide a fair electoral system. The process is not a simple one. There are many opportunities for rorts to occur, and we cannot allow rorts to happen. It is too important for our future and the future of the Territory for us to be put in the position of allowing to go forward an electoral system which is not as good as it could possibly be.
Madam Speaker, the Government promised legislation on this subject by the end of this year. If indeed the legislation arrives at the end of this year and it is debated next year, it will have been debated in this place and presumably passed more than two years after the original referendum result clearly indicated a preference by ACT citizens for Hare-Clark. I hope that we will have the legislation sooner than that; but I believe that this report will provide a helping hand to this Government, which seems to have found a great deal of difficulty in making the decisions necessary to get this vital legislation on the books for the ACT.
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