Category: Politics

Ensuring that the Australian Electoral Commission operates with integrity and in a non-partisan way is essential to the Australian political process.

Unfortunately, the current redistribution process is weakened by its lack of transparency and self-awareness.

By law, the members of each state’s redistribution committee are chosen by virtue of the public service roles they occupy – the Australian Electoral Commissioner as well as the three state-based positions of Australian Electoral Officer, Surveyor-General, and Auditor-General.

Similarly, the AEC Chair and non-judicial appointee member are appointed by the Governor-General from a shortlist of eminent judges and from the list of public service agency heads, respectively.

The lack of diversity in members of the AEC redistribution committee has the potential to introduce bias.

This has been most recently seen in the ACT redistribution proposal. The committee seemed to have few qualms in discarding all proposals received for electorate names. Instead, they have endorsed yet another white Anglo-Saxon male, Charles Bean.

Despite 30% of Australians having a culturally and linguistically diverse background, only around 5% of seats out of the 150 are named after significant CALD figures. Of the 70 electorate names considered by the Committee, it appears that only one (Ruth Arndt) was from a CALD background.

This lack of diversity is surprising and regrettable, since the ACT has many significant people from migrant backgrounds. Why was Romaldo Giurgola, the architect of Parliament House, not deemed suitable for consideration? The instigator of the Hare-Clark system in the ACT, Bogey Musidlak? Or Amirah Inglis, a prolific Canberra-based writer and author from Belgium? Or even Pawe? Strzelecki, the explorer who named Mount Kosciuszko?

Choosing an electorate name is important because it becomes part of our culture. Regardless of the norms of the time, we should not be honouring Bean, an anti-Semite, when there is the opportunity to improve the representation of non-Anglo-Saxon names in Australia’s electorates. Choosing a more diverse option would familiarise people with names that sound alien to them.

With more names like Kosciuszko, Chan, Gupta, and Nguyen for our electorates, people with names hailing from those backgrounds will feel included in Australian society.

The public should know who was responsible for drawing up the list of 70 names for consideration, how diversity was considered as part of the listing process, and what criteria were used in shortlisting. If a vote on the final name is required, the vote of each committee member should be on the public record.

There is a similar lack of transparency in the process of drawing boundaries.

The ACT’s districts, and especially those centred around the town centres of Belconnen, Woden, Gungahlin, and Tuggeranong have a strong local identity and community overlap. Many people in each district work, shop locally, and send their children to local schools.

Reasonable redistribution proposals that preserved these town centres were submitted for consideration. Yet the redistribution committee’s justification for discarding these alternative proposals was scant to non-existent. Their report simply notes that “many of the suggestions and comments on suggestions received advocated for a northern-central-southern split” as if that was sufficient justification.

Receiving 10 submissions when the ACT has a population of 410,000 is not enough to prove popular support for a particular boundary approach. Some of these submissions were not even from the ACT!

I call on the AEC to formalise and publish specific guidelines for carrying out future redistributions. This should include specifying the mechanisms for ensuring that all Australians are considered when naming seats, justifying a preference for specific electorate boundaries, and handling of arguments made in public submissions.

If the public does not have confidence that their submissions will get fair consideration, they will conclude that participation in our electoral processes is a waste of time.

The first sitting day of the ACT Assembly in May 1989 was not smooth. Accusations flew about backstabbing Opposition deals being done for thirty pieces of silver; members mournfully noted that the first Assembly included at least four members who thought the Assembly should not exist at all:

Bill Wood (Australian Labor Party): We have not been born in the most auspicious circumstances … This is the only parliament that I know of that has people sitting in it, who now share our aims, who do not want to be here and did not want this parliament to be here. So we have problems. I believe that the first task for us as members [is to show] the community by the way we do things that this Assembly will work, that it is a good idea, that the enormous amount of work we are going to take in is a necessary factor in our progress.

In that first year, the ACT Assembly was literally being made up as it went along. Standing orders, committees, the first set of four ministerial appointments – all done for the first time. The early years weren’t pretty with two government collapses occurring in just over two years.

Independents and protest parties came and went over the first few terms of the Assembly. With the switch to Hare-Clarke voting, the only Independent MLA to survive the first four terms of government was the population health expert Michael Moore.

Over time, the Legislative Assembly has become a more mature representative body. Fourteen years after the declaration of self-government, in the aftermath of the Canberra bushfires, Assembly members said:

Jon Stanhope (Australian Labor Party): If anything good can be taken from this disaster, it is a reminder of the incredible generosity, bravery, resilience and decency of Canberrans … Canberra is not merely a collection of houses and national monuments; it is a living, breathing community with unlimited capacity to give, care and pull together.

Bill Wood (Australian Labor Party): If it was ever in doubt, ACT self-government has come of age.

Twenty-five years on from self-government, there are nearly 100,000 extra people living in Canberra. While it is never popular to say that more politicians are needed, the workload of the Assembly has, in fact, increased dramatically. It is not just because we have extra citizens; today there are many more complex agreements with the Commonwealth and other States and Territories to fund and manage health, education, national security, and social services programs.

After working in the Assembly for a number of years, I’ve seen the stress Ministers go through first-hand as they attempt to balance the portfolio demands from both Territory and Federal public service departments. The appointment of a fifth Minister in 2003, and then a sixth in 2015 were attempts to spread the load more evenly across the Executive. However we still need backbenchers to participate in committees and other important Assembly functions. This, along with the need for stronger local representation by MLAs, is why the expansion of the Assembly to 25 members is welcome.

What will the next 25 years of the Assembly look like? Ultimately, that’s up to all of us. Now that we have five smaller, more local electorates, each of our individual votes has never mattered more.

Over the next 12 months people wanting to take part in the new and expanded Assembly will be asking for your vote (yes, hopefully including me). It’s a good time for reflection on what matters to you about your local representatives. How can they deliver a better Canberra for all of us?