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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (17 October) . . Page.. 1741 ..

Mr Berry: Except on the bottom of it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Except on the bottom, in fine print, yes, that is true. This large publication appeared a few days before the election. Of course, the Liberal Party also issued a piece of paper very late in the election campaign, and I imagine that this thing of Mr Moore's came out late in the campaign. Tell me, Mr Speaker: If a party issued something late in the election campaign, and if how-to-vote cards were banned, would it not also place a how-to-vote information slip on the back of this information, on the conveniently supplied blank piece of paper?

Mr Connolly: So you think that is a good thing to do - to have that information?

MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. Members indicated that they can do that, so why should it necessitate any more paper being distributed around the Territory? This stuff comes through in the last week of election campaigns. We all know that it does. You do it every time, we do it every time, everybody else does it every time. Why should this proposal to ban how-to-vote cards mean a single piece of paper more than we have at the moment? It does not mean anything of the sort.

I want to refer briefly to the referendum that was held earlier this year, which Ms Follett raised. She made great play of that referendum. She asked why other provisions about the entrenching of a ban on how-to-vote cards were not included in that referendum. I have already explained why you could not entrench something that is not already there; but it is worth noting in the context of this debate that, although Ms Follett and every one of her, at that time, seven other colleagues on her side of the house supported unanimously that referendum and the provisions in it, which she herself had moved to include in the legislation, at the referendum that followed in February this year not one cent of Labor Party expenditure, not one moment of Labor Party advertising time, not one breath of Labor Party effort was spent on promoting the referendum, which those opposite had put forward and supported to a man and a woman. Indeed, there was strong evidence that Labor Party workers in that campaign were actually telling people not to vote Yes for the referendum - "Do not vote Yes". What kind of sly, backhanded approach towards democracy is that? And these people over here pretend that they are trying to defend the principles of democracy! They say, "These people in the Government are trying to destroy democracy". What a joke!

Mr Berry made some strange remarks. He said that this legislation was unfair to parties not in the Assembly, that this legislation helps incumbents. That is a very poorly thought through comment. First of all, the present system aids those parties that have the manpower resources - or personpower resources, I suppose I should say these days - to throw a large number of people into situations where they can hand out how-to-vote cards, and not every party can do that. This provision very distinctly assists small parties and non-incumbents who do not have the resources to put those kinds of people at polling booths and saturate the entrances to polling booths so that everybody approaching the polling booth gets access to a how-to-vote card. It is those people, those parties, who are disadvantaged by the present system. This is a levelling measure. It gives everybody an equal chance to put their point of view to people in other ways and does not distort the picture by who is able to get people on polling day.

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