It may prod people into being more active about territorial affairs.
The addition of party voting to the Robson-Hare-Clark system approved in last year’s referendum is a bit like adding an office block to a wilderness so people have a wider choice of scenery. Great office block. Pity about the wilderness.
However, it may be a blessing. Let me explain. The eight other Australian polities (six states, the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory) only have to deal with apathy. The ACT has to deal with not only apathy, but a more corrosive political snobbery. In the other polities a large mass of people are content to measure out their lives in soap operas and sport. But those polities at least have a stratum of professionals, socially active people, academics and the like who do care about government and get involved.
Not so in the ACT. From the earliest days of self-government the cream of Canberra professionally and intellectually took great pride in professing ignorance of and disdain for affairs of the local Assembly. They kept their eyes on national affairs.
Top public servants (still horrified at the thought of a separate ACT service) looked to the Federal Public Service to give their lives and careers meaning and worth. In the fourth estate, it was difficult to get people interested in ACT affairs, certainly in the first two or three years of self-government.
This political snobbery (“We are above all this nonsense.”) has resulted in the surrender of the control of the Territory to about 400 active members of the Labor Party _ and under the new collegiate pre-selection system that will narrow further.
With the exception of two or three people in some community groups and one or two in the business community, the articulate and well-educated in Canberra by-and-large turned up their noses and looked disdainfully the other way. They would not dirty their hands with ACT governance unless their personal property interests were directly threatened.
Perhaps last week’s arrogant governmental veto of the 1992 referendum result will get more people to question how the ACT is governed. It may not shake the apathetic; but it should shake the snobs.
The issue goes wider than the electoral system, though that is quite fundamental. Perhaps it is time for an ACT Constitution which sets the number of MLAs, the electoral system, the length of the term, some basic civil rights and broad administrative-law principles, an independent judiciary and perhaps some audit provisions. These things would not be in the hands of whichever group happens to have the numbers in the Assembly on a given issue, but would only be able to be changed by referendum or, say, a two-thirds majority.
The Self-Government Act makes provision for entrenching laws, but the Assembly (filled as it is with politicians reluctant to surrender any power) has not passed the required enabling law.
The Hare-Clark (Emasculation) Bill has incidentally provided ammunition for proponents of two other reforms: voluntary voting and citizens’ initiative.
The Government has argued for a party box to make voting easier _ for presumably the semi-literate, moronic, apathetic and ill-informed. Under that logic, voting should be made voluntary. Only those who are informed and concerned enough should vote.
Secondly, the Government’s action has shown that it cannot be trusted do a simple thing like put into effect the clear desire of the people expressed in a referendum. Clearly, a mechanism is needed like citizen’s initiative (under which the collection of 20,000 or so signatures would force a binding referendum on an issue) to undo their chicanery and put in place what the people want.
Without some form of overriding democratic framework Abraham Lincoln’s hopes will be sadly realised in a different way here _ that government by the Labor Party machine of the Labor Party machine and for the Labor Party machine shall not perish from the face of the ACT.
As it is, we are to be left to the mercy of Dennis Stevenson. Labor has eight Members in favour of perverted Hare-Clark and the Liberal-Moore-Szuty camp has eight in favour or pure Robson-Hare-Clark. The mercurial Stevenson might well veto both the Liberal-Moore-Szuty amendments and the Bill itself, leaving us with a third election under d’Hondt.