An ACT proposal for citizen’s initiative will become a spark for other states and the Commonwealth, according to Opposition frontbencher Peter Reith.
He said yesterday that he was developing a “”green paper” on direct democracy under which citizens could after collecting a threshold of signatures force a referendum on a new law or to repeal an existing law.
He wanted more public debate.
“”It’s a great idea; it’s like all good ideas, it is simple as anything,” he said. “”But hardly anybody really knows anything about it. Once people understand they will be overwhelmingly in favour of the idea, but it will not happen over night. I want to see people talk about it and understand it.
A proposal by the Liberals in the ACT has support from the three independents and is likely to pass this year. Mr Reith said that it would be the spark for “”this concept to gradually be implemented in Australia over next 20 years”.
He was having a meeting with interested coalition MPs this week. However, he preferred to get public interest first because parliamentarians were a little threatened by the idea. But once the public wanted it, MPs were more likely to come round.
The present system worked well, but could be improved. Just by being there, citizen’s initiative would make politicians a bit more careful about what laws they passed.
People were better educated, more well-informed about political issues and wanted a greater say. Under the present system people were apathetic and cynical about the political process because their participation was limited to a vote once every three years.
“”I can envisage 100 years from today that the political process will employ the information super highway as a direct means of gauging public opinion on all sorts of issues,” he said.
He did not want to get bogged down in the details at present. Under eight proposals put in Australia recently, there was a broad pattern for a threshold of 2 to 5 per cent of voters’ signatures before a referendum could be held and that the vote be held at the next election.