Page 852 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 April 1994
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Members interjected.
MR HUMPHRIES: Members opposite groan, shake their heads and laugh nervously at this suggestion; but there was very little laughter in the Government ranks in December of last year when Ms Follett tabled in this place this Bill, the same Bill that appears on the notice paper for today's debate. It caused her to execute what is now known very widely in the Territory as the "Rosemary rotation". She very quickly had to back away from the scandalous and quite outrageous suggestions that she put forward for, in particular, above-the-line voting.
She was forced very quickly to realise that the people of the ACT were not going to tolerate the kind of shenanigans which this Government dished up to them to corrupt the result of that referendum which had been carried so decisively in February 1992. The Chief Minister understood that very well and it took but seven days, as I recall - seven long, hard, tedious, painful days of the Government desperately trying to defend this stupid decision - before it came to the point where it would say, "We have had enough. We have felt the heat. You can turn the blowtorch off. We will back away from these outrageous ideas". They eventually did that. It did no credit to Rosemary Follett or to her Government that the idea should have been put forward in the first place and that it took so long to realise that this view was totally unacceptable to the people of Canberra.
The thing that stood out in this Bill as presented to the Assembly was this concept of above-the-line voting - a concept completely alien to the Hare-Clark system, completely at odds with it; a grafted on concept that resulted in the bastardisation of that system. What is more important, I think, is that this new concept resulted not just in the extensive watering down, the extensive adulteration, of what people had decided in February 1992; it also established what was apparently, as far as I can tell, a totally unique electoral system in the entire world. Nobody I have ever heard of has a Hare-Clark system with some kind of ticket voting system attached to it. It is just not what people have used and practised before.
It is nothing like the Hare-Clark electoral system which has been in operation in Tasmania since about 1905 and has worked extremely well in that State - a system which is extremely popular and well regarded and understood by the citizens of that State. Indeed, it is a totally new system. It is something produced from the fevered imaginations of those opposite, those people who were anxious to make sure that, whatever electoral system we ended up with, it did not stop the factional games which the ALP plays and achieving some kind of assured result when the electors of the ACT happen to choose which of the winners of that factional game are to get seats in the Assembly. It is to the eternal disgrace of the Australian Labor Party that it should have attempted to make that kind of clear rejection, clear dropping, debasing, of the ACT electors' decision.
Madam Speaker, there was a major debate which led to the referendum of 1992, and it went for at least some 12 months. That in turn led to a debate which more or less led to this Bill. There was more than three years in total, certainly, in which the process of establishing a new electoral system got under way, and I assume that it has come near to fruition. Yet in the very latest stages of that debate new concepts were put forward - very
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