Canberra, 20 May 1968
4384. Personal
1. Assume you have been giving some thought to action which more active or politically minded Members of the House might institute when the House meets. Glad if you would let the Department have any comments on this generally as soon as possible. Hope we can discuss with Minister on 3rd June.
2. One specific matter might be a move to reconstitute immediately the Select Committee on the Constitution. In the event it does not seem practicable for the Official Members to oppose the setting up of such a committee straight out but there seems to be good arguments for delay such as—
(1) There should be some opportunity for Members of the House and for people at large to see the new system in operation for a time before changes are proposed in it
(2) The new Members of the House need to have at least some experience of the operation of the House itself
(3) It may be that the immediate requirement is a review of standing orders
3. Assuming no immediate action, and it would be difficult to envisage the Select Committee making another comprehensive tour of the Territory so soon before the new system has had a reasonable period of operation, and looking further ahead the first steps might be to look at some aspects of the legislature e.g.
(a) The size of the electorates (there is really a great discrepancy according to the debate in the House of Representatives)1
(b) Whether first-past-the-post optional preferences or compulsory preference is the best system of voting for the Territory circumstances
Perhaps we ought also to consider whether we would like to see examined—without necessarily raising it ourselves—the desirability of an upper house small in size (and therefore cost) with delaying powers only and with no power to initiate or block financial legislation. Part of the purpose of such a house would be to reflect the traditional disposition of the people of the Territory to settle their problems by consensus rather than by vote also to provide a check on the volatile and at times erratic House of Assembly. By small I mean a House consisting of 25 or 30 Members including 2 or 3 Official Members. With regard to composition there is an argument in favour of indirect election such as by a conference of representatives of Local Government Councils though one suggestion in this context would be that the upper house might include the present regional representation.
[NAA: A452, 19681932]
1 During debate on the Papua and New Guinea Bill 1968, Beazley argued that Australia must ‘move towards equal electorates’ in PNG. He was supported by F.E. Stewart (Labor Member for Lang), who listed discrepancies in numbers of voters in electorates, both regional (Bougainville, 21,844; Western Highlands, 110,878; Madang, 45,570) and open (Moresby, 4,451; South Bougainville, 11,864 and Rabaul, 7,633). Barnes replied, inter alia, that the current system was a product of a special recommendation of the Select Committee. ‘We did not fix the numbers’, he said, ‘the people selected this scheme’—and any subsequent Select Committee had the right to make ‘other suggestions’ ( Commonwealth parliamentary debates (Reps), vol. 59, 9 May 1968, pp. 1313, 1325, 1340.