Mr SOMLYAY (10:31 AM) —I am very pleased to follow the member for Lingiari in the debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Representation in the House of Representatives) Bill 2004, because he and I have had a long association.

Mr SOMLYAY —I will not tell too many stories, Warren, but in our early days here we met many times on the football field. Our respective careers took us to different states. Mine took me to Queensland and his took him to the Northern Territory, and we again met up here in parliament many years later.

I have had a long association with the Northern Territory. On Christmas Day 1974, I was a young person living in Canberra. The Director-General of Health rang me on Christmas morning and said, `Listen mate, can you get into the natural disaster headquarters? Something has happened in Darwin. We do not know what has happened, but the NDO has been mobilised. Can you get in there?' I asked, `Will I be home for Christmas lunch?' And they said, `Yeah, sure. We only want you there for an hour or so.' I got home four days later. We all know what the devastation was in Darwin, and I was tied up with the medivacs out of there and a lot of the emergency work.

Two years later, I was chief of staff to the minister for the Northern Territory, and I was vitally involved in the writing of the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act, which gave the territory self-government on 1 July 1978. By coincidence, 20 years later I was back in this place as a minister for territories at a time when the government initiated a referendum in the Territory to bring about statehood, which I would have thought was a noncontroversial issue at the time. Unfortunately, the referendum question became more complicated than was intended and the people of the Northern Territory voted against becoming a state. I still hope beyond hope that that question will be resolved and that it can be done in a way that is fully inclusive and the Territory can become a state, because I think it should be. If it were a state, we would not be here talking about this bill right now.

I also want to acknowledge the presence of the member for Kooyong, the chairman of the joint committee. There is no-one in this country who has a better knowledge of electoral matters than the member for Kooyong, and his knowledge and contribution are respected by both sides of the House. This bill gives effect to the government's response to the findings of his joint committee. Not only were the joint committee's three recommendations unanimous, but the government fully supports them.

All three committee recommendations are encompassed in the bill, and they have two unambiguous purposes. Firstly, they clarify and define the statistical processes used to calculate the number of House of Representative members each state and territory is entitled to elect. Secondly, they ensure that the Northern Territory is not disadvantaged at the next election by what the committee saw as a flawed process in the 2003 quota determination. This bill sets aside that determination in relation to the Northern Territory so that at the next election it can continue to elect two members. However, the amendment—the exception—only applies to the next election, because, if this bill is passed, future determinations will be subject to its other amendments which clarify the process of quota determination.

Mr Deputy Speaker Mossfield, as you are well aware, the Australian Constitution guaranteed each original state at least five seats in the House of Representatives. Subsequently, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory were guaranteed one seat each by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. Subject to these minimum entitlements, a combination of the Constitution and the Electoral Act sets out a precise manner for determining the number of House of Representatives members that each state and territory can return at a federal election. This determination is based on total population figures, both for the Commonwealth and also for each state and territory. The method of calculation is quite specific—that is not the problem, and this bill in no way seeks to alter that. The problem is the lack of a definition and a time frame for the actual statistics used in those calculations. What this bill aims to do is to provide a definition and a time frame, certainty and transparency, to the statistics used to calculate how many members each state and territory is entitled to elect to the House of Representatives.

What highlighted this lack of certainty—this lack of definition and transparency—in the present processes was the February 2003 determination. In 2003, the Australian Electoral Commissioner found that Queensland, because of its increased population, should gain one extra seat and that South Australia and the Northern Territory each should lose one. What this meant for the Northern Territory was that at the next federal election it would be entitled to only one member instead of its current two, as the member for Lingiari pointed out, to represent a population of approximately 200,000 people. The Electoral Commissioner determined that the Northern Territory was 295 people short of the quota for two seats.

While 295 may seem to many to be a small number of people, the shortfall has a very big meaning for the Northern Territory. We are talking about a shortfall of 295 people in an estimated—I stress the word `estimated'—population figure for an area of over 1.3 million square kilometres. To put this in perspective, we are talking of an estimated shortfall of 295 people in an area roughly twice the size of New South Wales. If we could be certain that this quota was calculated on reasonably accurate published figures then I would say that, even though representing the interests of the whole of the Northern Territory is an enormous job for one person, the referee—the Electoral Commissioner—has spoken; he has made his calculations according to law; and we would have to abide by his findings. However, it is not as simple as that, which is why this decision resulted in an inquiry.

The loss of the Northern Territory's second seat by such a small margin generated much public discussion, and, as a result, in July 2003 the Special Minister of State requested that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters inquire into and report on guaranteeing a minimum of two House of Reps seats each for the ACT and the Northern Territory. The Joint Committee reported in November 2003, with, as I said, three unanimous recommendations. The first two recommendations define and specify particular statistics and processes to ensure uniformity and fairness in determining future quotas for each state or territory. The third recommendation was:

That is, the committee recommended that, just for the next federal election, the Northern Territory be allowed to elect two members to the House of Representatives. The amendments contained in this bill should eliminate the need for such an exception in future, because a quota will be calculated using more specific figures and transparent processes.

As I have already said, the government fully supports all three recommendations of the joint standing committee and has drafted this bill specifically to legislate those recommendations. However, I must stress that the committee did not support a legislative guarantee of two seats for each territory regardless of its population, and nor does the government. In fact, the committee reported:

That is the crux of the matter: the committee identified systemic disadvantages to the territories in relation to statistical calculations, and has made simple recommendations to overcome them. The problem is not in the legislatively defined processes for calculating the quota; the problem is in the estimated population figures used in the calculations. With this bill, the government seeks to rectify the lack of definition which has now been recognised.

The committee was concerned about the method by which the `latest statistics of the Commonwealth' are obtained and about the absence of legislative definition. It found that, without such definition, the Australian Statistician and the Australian Electoral Commissioner `are given a degree of unintended discretion when deciding which statistics will be used'. For instance, there is no stipulated time frame for the figures—they could be the latest figures, the last ones published or even last year's figures. There are no directives on whether the figures have been published or not; and there are no directives on what error margin is used for the estimates or on publication of the calculations.

Using population figures from different dates can of course give different results. For example, in the February 2003 determinations, the Australian Bureau of Statistics provided the Electoral Commissioner with the September 2002 population figures despite the fact that, at the time, even the June figures were still unpublished. If the June figures had been used, the NT would have retained its second seat because the estimated June population was higher than that for September.

This bill seeks to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act so that the Electoral Commissioner is required to ascertain relevant populations on the reference day—the first day after 12 months from the first sitting of the House of Representatives of the new parliament. It specifies the statistics and it specifies the day. It also requires the statistics to be published. The commissioner must use:

The other aspect of the population calculations which concerned the committee were error margins. Because we do not have a census every election, populations can only be estimated. Even the Australian Bureau of Statistics has acknowledged that there is greater unreliability in the population estimates for the territories than those for the states, largely because of the difficulty in deriving accurate estimates from smaller populations. This was covered by the member for Lingiari. The error margin for the Northern Territory is up to three times higher than that for the states and six times higher than the error margin for the whole of Australia.

The shortfall of 295 for the Northern Territory last year is well within that error margin. That is why the joint committee recommended that in future, if the quota shortfall for a territory is within the margin of error acknowledged by the ABS, the Australian Electoral Commissioner should use the population figure at the top of the margin of error to determine that territory's entitlement. It should use the higher figure.

If this bill is passed, and I am sure it will be—if the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is amended to specifically define population calculations for House of Representative quotas—then the 2003 problem will not arise in the future. Not only does this bill ensure fair representation for the Northern Territory at the next election; it ensures that the quota calculations for each state and territory will be based on published statistics, in a particular time frame, with the Australian Statistician advising the applicable margin for statistical error.

It is not that anyone thinks that the Australian Statistician or the Electoral Commissioner do, or ever have done, the wrong thing—far from it—but it safeguards everyone concerned to have the base statistics for quota calculations defined, published and transparent. It ensures that justice and fair play are not only done but seen to be done. I commend the bill to the House.