Page 5119 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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Mr Hanson interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mrs Dunne was heard. Let us hear Mr Hargreaves.
MR HARGREAVES: I made no comment. Mr Speaker, I made no comment and I would ask those people over there to pay me the same courtesy, please. It did not come out of nowhere. It came out of the recommendations from the Electoral Commission. The government actually did exactly the right thing. It made a submission to the standing committee for deliberation and report back to this chamber. That is exactly what has happened.
All the way through Mrs Dunne’s speech she accused Labor of being anti this, anti that, anti something else. It really is tiresome. I suspect, in fact, that there is a little bit of “They doth protest too much” in here. I think perhaps we are seeing a little bit of “Don’t throw me in the briar patch, Brer Fox!” “Let’s blame the Labor Party for it and we will oppose it.”
Mrs Dunne is the proportional representational zealot in this chamber. I have to pay her some respect for that, because she has actually run up that flag and she wears it proudly. That is fine. I am not so sure about her colleagues, however. It is fine for them to say, “We are going to oppose it, but go Labor, go Greens!” At the end of the day, those opposite will be in exactly the same position as the party, as the Labor Party and the Greens. They will be in exactly the same position. There will be no advantage to anybody from that.
It also concerns me that so long after the conclusion of the Hare-Clark debate, Mrs Dunne continues to rail against the Labor Party’s position in that debate. In a democratic society, anybody is entitled to put a contrary view. When they put that contrary view and do not have it carried, they get on with it. That is what occurred. The Labor Party believed in a single-member electorate system and did not win the argument.
Mrs Dunne: You don’t remember the Rosemary Follett cartoon—looking for her credibility.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Speaker, I heard Mrs Dunne again. She has got to be the rudest person in this chamber. I would ask her to just settle for a little while; just settle for a little while. Let us end it on a reasonable note.
The Labor Party supported single-member electorates and did not win the argument. So we go on. We have got on with it. We are all here in this place because of that system. I suggest to you that many of us in fact are in here—I know Mr Speaker is and I think possibly Mrs Dunne as well—as beneficiaries of the Robson rotation process before it was enhanced. Did we oppose the enhancement? Of course not.
She also says that in 1998, we did all sorts of terrible things. I can actually recall us trying to increase the size of the Assembly, putting forward reasonable justification for that, to find it opposed on party grounds because the number did not suit those
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