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CRAIG COMMENTS |
New Council
22 February 2006
Last week’s response from Peter Hall, the Nationals’ MLC for Gippsland to my recent Comment Column on Legislative Council Reform makes interesting reading. I was congratulated on that article by a senior official of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia who, by chance, read the column while holidaying in the area.
Peter’s comments are correct if voters continue to vote the way they have for the past 50 years. With the help of large donations from “the city”, political parties have made sure that the chances of any other viewpoint being expressed in Parliament are almost nil.
In 1999, however, Gippsland East voters joined a growing number of rural electorates and demonstrated that they are fed up with neglect from State and Commonwealth governments while those governments compete with one another to give handouts to the metropolitan area. It was a spontaneous reaction – not because of high pressure political campaigning.
His analysis of the probable results for this province is based on the presumption that voters will continue to vote in the same way and he will try to ensure that they do. He ignores the fact the government is decided by the vote in the Legislative Assembly and the Upper House is supposed to be a house of review. It is quite absurd to then vote for a mirror image in the Legislative Council. We might just as well follow New Zealand and Queensland and abolish the Upper House.
Part of Peter’s opposition to the new system is that it uses the same voting method as the Senate. The Nationals only won a Senate seat because voters blindly followed the Liberal Party directions on how to vote and the Liberals gave them a winnable position every second election. The executive of the Nationals executive chose the candidate – and we all know what a mess they made of that.
He claims that, “In future, politicians will seek to appease the most populated part of their electorates…and the wishes of those in far away East Gippsland will be ignored.” The Prime Minister, who his colleagues support in Canberra, recently said, "Politics, as you all know, is remorselessly governed by the laws of arithmetic". If that is the opinion of all Members of Parliament, country people should be packing up and getting out while they still can.
To base the size of electorates on numbers alone in a big and diverse country like Australia is bad enough, but once elected a Member of Parliament has a responsibility to all voters, wherever they live and however they voted. This should also apply to governments, but unfortunately for country people, our Prime Minister does not understand the difference between governing and electioneering. It is the Nationals in Canberra who give the Prime Minister the numbers to get over the line, but they are not prepared to challenge his policies.
In Gippsland East, the votes at Mallacoota or a dozen other smaller communities represent a small portion of the total. I would be surprised if Peter, like me, was not influenced by the opinions of those people even though they represent an even smaller portion of his voters. As Peter points out, candidates will be dependent on the political parties to get them over the line so they will be pressuring the parties to modify their policies to try and maximise their votes in the small communities.
It is unlikely to happen in just one election, but country people will learn how to use the new voting system for the Upper House and why it is essential that the Legislative Council becomes a real house of review. A small number of Independents can play a greater role in that review than a house full of party hacks, who, as Peter admits, are dependent on political parties. Country people will learn over time that Independents are their representatives in Parliament, while the others are simply nothing more than party representatives in the electorates.
