Month: March 1993

The ACT Government has put a stop to joint private-ACT Housing Trust development in the inner city following concerns over land speculation.

The Minister for Urban Services, Terry Connolly, said he was sending a signal to people buying houses next to trust properties in the hope of getting a profitable redevelopment deal.

Specualtion would not work, he said. There would be no more joint private-trust deals until after the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee of the Legislative Assembly had come up with some publicly available guidelines.

His move came after a call by Independent MLA Michael Moore for an inquiry into development in Section 22, Braddon. Mr Moore’s call came after suggestions that developers were asking residents to sell, and suggesting that medium-density development would surround them if they did not.
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Understanding the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a simple matter compared to the electoral process that faces the ACT in the next year.

Electoral authorities will be doing Trinity squared as they divide the ACT into three electorates. Not once, but twice. Once for the three ACT seats and once again for the three federal seats.

But the boundaries will have to be different. And they will be drawn up by two different sets of officials using some similar criteria and other dissimilar criteria. Many people will find themselves voting in the same electorate in both federal and local elections, but a good many will be in one electorate federally and a different one locally.

How did this extraordinary bureaucratic duplication come about?
Continue reading “1993_03_march_boundary”

Tn April, 1988, he was accused by police of being the linchpin in a major car-stealing racket. At the time he was fixing up and re-spraying his two cars and one owned by his de-facto wife. He has been fixing and reconstructing cars for 30 years. At the time Mr Bond gave police details of where all the parts came from. The cars were seized by police to use in evidence. The cars were held outdoors in the Fyshwick yard. And there they stayed for nearly three years during the drawn out court process .

Mr Bond was convicted in the magistrates court and sentenced to three years’ jail on various charges. No-one else in the “”major car-stealing ring” was charged.

Mr Bond appealed to the Supreme Court. In the process of that appeal he had to take some paint samples from one of the cars. Police made him sign a document saying he would make good any damage when the cars were claimed by their “”true owners”.
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The death of a candidate before polling means the election wholly fails, according to the Electoral Act.

It means no voting for the seat will take place on March 13. However, people in the seat still have to go to the polls to elect senators.

The election for the House of Representatives seat works much like a by-election, except the Prime Minister does not get a say in the timing. The Electoral Act provides that “”a new writ shall forthwith be issued” for a supplementary election.
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The ACT is now entitled to a third federal seat _ unofficially.

Officially, the Australian Electoral Commission will do its redistribution in the 10th month after the next sitting of Parliament, as required by the Electoral Act.

However, unofficially, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that the ACT’s population of 297,700 is 570 more than enough to give the ACT the third seat.

Under electoral law, the total population of the six states ÿ(subs correct: the six states only, not the total population) is divided by 144 (twice the number of state senators) to form a quota. The quota is divided into the population of each state and territory. Any remainder over half a quota results in an extra seat. The ACT is in this position now.

It is unlikely that the ACT will fall behind the quota in the time until the official redistribution because it has a higher population growth than the rest of Australia.

The extra seat means the size of the House of Representatives is likely to increase to 148 next election, depending on state quotas.

At the last election the two ACT seats, Fraser and Canberra, were the two most populous in the country with 96,185 and 94,273 voters respectively. With three seats, the ACT’s seats, with about 63,500 each, will be the least populous in Australia for some time _ smaller than those in Tasmania which is guaranteed five seats under the Constitution no matter what its population.

Several people from both sides of politics have had their eye on the third seat for some time. These will probably now come out in earnest.< pc The great ACT divisions