Page 1672 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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Mr Stefaniak approached the attorney’s office and said, “Can we sit down and work through this?” The answer was, “No. You can like it or lump it. We have got the numbers; we will be just pushing it through.”
This is another example of the arrogant lack of regard for democracy with the majority Stanhope Labor government. Mr Corbell can sigh and exhale dramatically, but what it boils down to is that Mr Corbell will use his numbers here today to make the ACT Electoral Act that little bit less democratic than it was before.
We have to remember the history of this Electoral Act. I have been involved in politics in the ACT for a long time. I am very proud of my commitment and my contribution to how this Electoral Act looks. I was one of the people who represented the Liberal Party on the Hare-Clark Campaign Committee. Along with my husband and some of the staff in this Assembly, I was one of the people who, for all of 1992, worked long and hard to ensure that we had a good and a fair electoral system in the ACT.
As a result of the hard work of people like me, my husband, a range of people from the Greens and Democrats and people who were just interested in the community, we turned this community around, because we could demonstrate that having a Hare-Clark electoral system like the one that we have now was the best possible solution for the people of the ACT. We did polling on this. At the beginning of the Hare-Clark election campaign, fewer than 30 per cent of people thought that Hare-Clark was a good idea. Because we had a good product to sell, by the time we went to the 1992 referendum in excess of 75 per cent of people voted in favour of introducing the Hare-Clark electoral system.
What did we see under the Labor Party? As soon as Rosemary Follett got her chance to do something about Hare-Clark, she attempted to pass a bill which completely ignored the will of the people in the ACT. She tried to doctor the Hare-Clark system to the advantage of the Labor Party. It took until 1998 for the Labor Party to admit that Hare-Clark was here to stay and was the electoral system that they had to work with.
What we have now is yet another attempt by the Labor Party. It is not going to undermine the Hare-Clark aspects of the system, because we managed to entrench all of those after Rosemary Follett’s tour de force. I still remember Geoff Pryor’s Canberra Times cartoon showing Rosemary Follett on the floor on the day after she introduced her Hare-Clark legislation, which was an abrogation of Hare-Clark. There were all these people saying, “What are you looking for, Rosemary?” They said, “Shh; she’s looking for her credibility.”
The Labor Party has undermined its credibility once more with the introduction of this legislation. This legislation goes against the democratic spirit that the people of the ACT have fought long and hard for. The only people who opposed the introduction of Hare-Clark into the ACT—and you know this well, Mr Speaker—were the Labor Party, because it did not give them everything that they wanted all the time. Now they are using their majority to make this an electoral system which is as undemocratic as possible.
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