Page 867 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 April 1994
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In order to keep faith with the voters of the ACT, the referendum options booklet, modelled as it was so closely on the legislation providing for the referendum, must be the primary source of guidance in drawing up the electoral legislation. To the extent that it differs from the Tasmanian Electoral Act 1985 in relation to voting and counting it should prevail. Elsewhere the Tasmanian legislation must be a strong starting point modified only to deliver increased fairness to participants and enhanced voter effectiveness.
An editorial in the Melbourne Age of 3 March 1980 said:
Tasmania has an electoral system that is clearly the best in Australia and one of the best in the world.
Dr Dean Jaensch of Flinders University said on the 7.30 Report on 11 May 1989, when talking on Hare-Clark:
It is a system, I think, Tasmanians should be proud of. The Hare-Clark system is, I consider, the fairest electoral system possible.
Madam Speaker, members should not be put off by what Dr Jaensch refers to as "the beautiful complexity of Hare-Clark". The Tasmanian experience works, and the ACT electorate wants the system adopted. This Bill should reflect this. I look forward, Madam Speaker, to making further contributions during this debate in the detail stage.
MR KAINE (4.05): After nearly 20 years on the local political scene I am never surprised at what I hear people say in debate. I am sometimes confounded, sometimes bemused; but I am never surprised. After listening to the debate today it is interesting just how far away from the point of the debate people can get. For example, we heard Mr Stevenson say that the whole thing is wrong because the referendum that the Commonwealth conducted two years ago was not the right referendum. Of course, he has his own views about the kinds of questions that should have been asked. I could postulate that each voter should have been given a blank sheet of paper and asked, "What kind of electoral system do you want? Write an essay and tell us what you want". That was not the way it was done. You had to confine the questions to something that was reasonable. Mr Stevenson did not like the questions.
I have not seen any ground swell of public opinion against the referendum that was held - not at the time and not since. There was not a huge informal vote at the referendum, so one has to assume that, by and large, people accepted that the referendum was right. It asked the right questions and it gave the right answer. To try to put a question mark around what is now being done by this parliament two years later as a consequential act to that referendum, and to say that it is not right because the referendum did not ask the right questions, is nonsense.
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