Contexts in which the word democracy was used in the Senate during the 1970s

• In conjunction with other nations, notably the United States of America, we wish to ensure that the people of South Vietnam have the right to live under a system of democracy, with free elections and all the freedoms that we in this country particularly enjoy. [More…]

• Will the Prime Minister also investigate the Communist decisions made at the World Federation of Churches, again as alleged by this great peace loving champion of democracy from Boothby? [More…]

• A political issue in a democracy is a matter for the individual and when there is an attempt to confuse political issues with trade union activities tremendous damage is done to the causes of the ACTU and the trade union movement. [More…]

• All I wish to add by way of underlining the facts is that it is a very idle use of question time for the Opposition in the Senate to talk about the candidates for a Vietnam election when elections, as we know them, have no vestige of existence in the Communist parties which are opposing the establishment of democracy in Vietnam. [More…]

• In a statement on international affairs, the then Prime Minister stated: 1 make these remarks not because I desire even to appear to resist the development of democracy in other communities; on the contrary, it is one of the great hopes of the world. [More…]

• Democracy at long last will have a free go in Papua New Guinea. [More…]

• The Leader of the Opposition (Senator Withers) has conceded the wisdom of the measure in the interests of democracy and there is really nothing further to be said. [More…]

• We all look forward to the restoration of democracy in Chile. [More…]

• By way of preface I refer to the concern in some Opposition quarters about trade union democracy. [More…]

• Will the Minister confer with the appropriate State Ministers and his Federal colleagues, to inject democracy into funds of this nature? [More…]

• Does the Leader, as a parliamentarian, not consider that such action for such a reason helps to destroy the democracy of the Senate as a very important arm of democratic government in this country? [More…]

• I believe that is democracy. [More…]

• That support should be given to the growing world movement for the return of democracy to Chile. [More…]

• In this system of democracy one of the purposes of debate is to enlighten the people. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• I think that those who believe that parliament is the focal point of democracy believe that senators should have a reasonable opportunity to speak and to ask questions. [More…]

• That the undersigned men and women of Australia believe in a Christian way of life; and that no democracy can thrive unless its citizens are responsible and law abiding. [More…]

• Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that the members in Parliament assembled will see that the powerful communicator, television, is used to build into the nation those qualities of character which make a democracy work- integrity, teamwork and a sense of purpose by serving, and that television be used to bring faith in God to the heart of the family and national life. [More…]

• Should the Court Government pass this Bill and at some future date invoke its fascist provisions could any action be taken by the Australian Government to protect the civil liberties of Western Australian citizens and the existence of parliamentary democracy in the State? [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognised by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• I think that whilst we have people like Senator Bishop in the Ministry no fears need be held by anyone in regard to what we are trying to do in bringing a new charter of democracy to trade unions. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• Is it not important for the future of democracy in this country that a clear vote of the people should be secured to see - [More…]

• The basic and fundamental issue which we in the Opposition are asserting and will continue to assert is whether the people of Australia, in a democracy, shall have the right to vote. [More…]

• We believe that in a complete democracy there should be this method of election carried through to the ultimate. [More…]

• It will be a very sad day for democracy in Australia when we start to quibble over a few dollars in relation to whether or not the public at large ought to know the contents of a document. [More…]

• I am asking again whether the Senate is going to tear up democracy and deny me the right to have this table incorporated in Hansard. [More…]

• I feel that they will be worried tonight because of the complete destruction of democracy that we have seen today. [More…]

• I want merely to say on behalf of the Opposition that this is one of the darkest weeks of so-called parliamentary democracy that we have ever witnessed. [More…]

• As professional librarians we are strongly committed to maintaining the free flow of information which is essential to any elightened democracy. [More…]

• Democracy has just Mown out the window if the Minister got the call in order 10 move a gag. [More…]

• The procedure is synonymous with British parliamentary democracy which we have come to respect and cherish in a world in which many forms of government are practised, in many cases to the detriment of the people concerned. [More…]

• Another aspect that concerns me greatly is the growing trend in this country - a trend that 1 feel is a danger to the democracy and freedom that we have won over the years, and a trend that is condoned by many - to buck authority, the laws of the land and our law making institutions under the guise of freedom of speech, the rights of the individual and the rights of minorities. [More…]

• Under British democracy as we know it the elected representatives of the people have the final say. [More…]

• They were never afraid in the cause of democracy to express their views, but the Liberal Partyapparatus is. [More…]

• Will the Leader of the Government in the Senate state what action the Government has taken about the member of the Liberal Party who has made public statements, which have not been retracted, that he supports trampling upon the human rights of the people of Rhodesia and that he supports legislation which is anathema to democracy and freedom loving people all over the world? [More…]

• Again I say that in the United Nations at the present time we need a spokesman for democracy - a man who will defend the small nations. [More…]

• If we want to show the Communist world that democracy has more to offer than Communism has, let us take a country that is desperately in need, build it up and show that something can be done there. [More…]

• That is the way we can win the Asian people to the side of democracy. [More…]

• I challenge America and Britain to take up this challenge now and to make India a worthwhile country and one to which everyone can look and say: “This is a country in which democracy has shown exactly what it can do”.’ [More…]

• I note that one man expressed the opinion that, because of those factors, democracy in that country had defeated itself. [More…]

• I do not know whether we should read George Orwell’s book on the Spanish Revolution or whether we should read other books to the left or to the right of the views in that book, but we should have a 1 970 concept of democracy. [More…]

• The Government and those who support it have been challenged constantly by members of the Opposition because, as they say, we have not had the courage to justify and support the Government’s attitude in maintaining that the security of South Vietnam is an appropriate cause for people who desire liberty and democracy throughout the world to espouse. [More…]

• But if we believe in democracy we should believe that this sort of information should not be confined to a few people. [More…]

• I suggest that they cease reflecting upon their own meetings and turn their attention to the overall administration of the democracy which exists in Australia and is administered in the Territory through the present Commonwealth Government. [More…]

• This is not democracy. [More…]

• The Government pays lip service to democracy and to getting the royal assent to Bills. [More…]

• I am prepared to debate this issue because I believe in democracy and in government by the elected representatives of the people. [More…]

• Never let it be forgotten that the Weimar Republic was a democracy and that democracy was destroyed by mob rule on the streets by competing factions. [More…]

• i object to the doctrine that law and order must be obeyed according to the book and according to the letter, and that this is the only test of democracy, because all too often it is the very means by which democracy is destroyed and democracy . [More…]

• There was talk about democracy. [More…]

• We have consistently said that the National Service Act is a bad law and that all of the restrictions on civil liberties that exist in this country are bad laws because if one has not the sense of freedom and the sense of democracy at heart, if one is not prepared to speak up for one’s fellow men, then all democracy is lost. [More…]

• There is an opportunity now for any Government supporters who have any semblance of democracy in their hearts to come out and lead the Moratorium Campaign. [More…]

• I rose to speak on this matter primarily because I want to say something about what I believe is a debasement of any real democracy in this country by the smearers and character assassins who attack this movement. [More…]

• I ask the Leader ofthe Government in the Senate: In view of statements of Government supporters who say they believe in the people’s right to dissent and protest in our democracy, but who claim to he very concerned at the possibility of violence on the day of the forthcoming Vietnam Moratorium pro- test, will the Leader of the Government in the Senate request State governments to close off for 30 minutes traffic from certain streets in capital cities where these protests are to he held, as is frequently done for marches and like events, and thereby show that the Government is sincere in its endeavour to see peaceful protest demonstrations? [More…]

• He has said that Parliament is but a manifestation of democracy. [More…]

• If by that he meant that government by the people is government by the mass of the people, then I would give him credence but government by the mass of the people means adopting something like the Greek city-state idea of democracy- [More…]

• Yet that is the only way in which it can be said that we are not a democracy. [More…]

• What Dr Cairns is putting forward, what the Moratorium Campaign appears to be based on and what the members of the Labor Party are giving credence to is not democracy and cannot be democracy. [More…]

• His statement is the antithesis of democracy. [More…]

• In that type of confrontation are sown the seeds of democracy’s destruction. [More…]

• He uses words like ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’. [More…]

• The United States has certainly been a great bastion of democracy, the last one of consequence left in the world. [More…]

• A Government in Australia or in any democracy, cannot take shipping companies or private enterprises by the scruff of the neck and say: “You establish here. [More…]

• The Moratorium is to be condemned not only because it is a fraud based upon a lie but also because it is an assault upon democracy. [More…]

• Those who support the Moratorium Campaign rejoice in the rights of democracy. [More…]

• As we have known democracy to date, it consists of an organised community under a constitution that has been accepted by the people. [More…]

• I have spoken in this debate because there are principles in our democracy that can be abused if they are misunderstood, and there is every possibility that by the mass movement involved in this Moratorium they will be abused. [More…]

• It is said that we who have a duty to civilisation, a duty to democracy and a duty to the young men of Australia should keep out of this Campaign because there are some Communists in it or Communists may be in the leadership of it. [More…]

• He said that this is one of the great weaknesses of democracy and it led to a complete failure to recognise significant events in Germany in the 1930s. [More…]

• I have said before in this place and I have no hesitation in repeating that there is a right in our democracy of orderly demonstration and orderly dissent. [More…]

• I repeat: I have no difficulty in saying that the right of dissent is recognised in the framework of our democracy, but that right of dissent does not mean that when you do not like a law you can break it by demonstrating. [More…]

• How does the Leader of the Government in the Senate justify parliamentary democracy when he uses Dorothy Dix questions at question time as a means of attacking the Moratorium and peaceful students who want to demonstrate against the Vietnam war? [More…]

• The Government, with a sense of responsibility, wishing to preserve what we have built up in our democracy throughout our history, is concerned about people doing these things, inciting others to break the law and inducing innocent people - starry-eyed people, if you like - to become associated with them without realising the type of association they are getting into. [More…]

• It has always been a source of amazement to me that I never hear one good word from these apostles of democracy from the Opposition, for this country, South Vietnam, which is being racked by invasion. [More…]

• The whole of our Australian democracy is built around our complete freedoms. [More…]

• Because of the handicaps which are being placed on the government of the country by, unfortunately, a fairly large number of the Government’s supporters and a small number of Ministers the people of Australia are not going to get the democracy to which they are entitled. [More…]

• Senator Georges also referred to the Australian Government’s support of the enemies of democracy. [More…]

• Nol democracy but dictatorship - to use violence against counter revolutionaries and exploiters who refuse to submit to reform. [More…]

• This is democracy at work, lt means thaI all political groups which do not submit lo Communist dictatorship will be ruthlessly rooted out. [More…]

• They are beginning to stand on one side and other people in this democracy of ours stand on the other. [More…]

• Members of the Labor Party in years gone by held themselves out as great supporters of democracy. [More…]

• They said that they believed in democracy. [More…]

• Not only do I believe in democracy but I also practise it wherever possible. [More…]

• If honourable senators opposite believe in democracy they should practise it. [More…]

• It is said that those Australians are a terrible lot who are there fighting for democracy and to keep people in their own country. [More…]

• I challenge any honourable senator opposite to say whether this is not something of which democracy should be proud. [More…]

• At one time it called itself a party of humanitarian character, a party that believed in true democracy. [More…]

• I believe that was one of the best things that could have happened for democracy. [More…]

• lt was knocking the North West Cape installation and our boys fighting for democracy in Malaysia. [More…]

• I will say this: In that event you would not have an insincere leader; you would have a person who really believed in democracy. [More…]

• In view of the loyalty of the people of this country, their belief in standing up for democracy and for the freedom of individuals in this and other countries, if the Labor Party comes out with this sort of thing again it will be decimated again and the opportunity that it might have had will be gone to the moon. [More…]

• I am convinced that the average Australian believes in his own mind that the greatest insurance policy which any Australian government can give this country is by cooperating and working with the United Slates in the fight for freedom and liberty not only in this country but in other countries which need our assistance, lt staggers me to hear honourable senators opposite who are failing in what their Party has stood for over the years - the love of democracy and the belief that we should help the underdog and those people who need help - now talk as they have done tonight. [More…]

• Surely the people of South Vietnam deserve the help and assistance of all those who love and believe in democracy and the right and opportunity for everybody to live in the way he desires. [More…]

• I only hope that the leaders of this Government, instead of sitting back and taking a defensive attitude, will take more of the offensive in this political fight and show the Australian people that what is being done is the right thing for the preservation of liberty and democracy. [More…]

• This is what is done by people who parade as supporters of democracy. [More…]

• They say that their purpose in sending conscripts to be killed in Vietnam is to save democracy, but their democracy consists of refusing to allow scholarly discussion, serious discussion relating to the Labor movement, to take place in Australia. [More…]

• This is what they understand by democracy: That we should be a society in which a man who is able to travel freely in Europe, whose books are available throughout the world, should be denied the opportunity to enter this country. [More…]

• This is the democracy that these people stand for. [More…]

• This is the kind of democracy which I and the Australian Labor Party repudiate. [More…]

• He said: T wish that some of these people who protest could go and see the good’ - I emphasise the word ‘good’ - ‘that my comrades and others have done, not just for the cause of democracy in keeping a foreign enemy out of this country but in helping the reconstruction and development and the opportunity for freedom and advancement for these people.1 Here is a young man who has been willing and prepared to sacrifice not only his career but, if necessary, his life and when he comes back he is prepared to stand up and say these things. [More…]

• Now, what is this Moratorium doing in reality other than assisting the Communist cause of subverting the cause of freedom and democracy and the development of self-government in South Vietnam? [More…]

• The Standing Orders and parliamentary practice have provided vehicles to enable senators and members of the parliaments of our democracy to discuss matters. [More…]

• As I have said previously, and I still say now, it will be a sorry day for Australia if the tactics of the Moratorium - the espousal of a doctrine that democracy can be in some way expressed by mob rule on the streets - ever wins any public acceptance. [More…]

• He said - and I am sure that he could never convince Australians of this - that Australia has always been supporting the enemies of democracy. [More…]

• When expressions like that are used in what is one of the freest, truest democracies in the world it is an indication that the whole sympathy of one Labor Party Senator in this place is with people who are completely opposed to the principles of freedom and democracy which are characteristic of Australia. [More…]

• essential freedom and democracy of this country. [More…]

• When we associate this with the doctrine that citizens have a right to disobey any laws which they please and couple that with the view that democracy and decisions equal or greater in importance than decisions of the Parliament can be made in the streets, we have for the very first time in this country the emergence of a philosophy and a doctrine which can be used if people wish to do so for nothing less than revolutionary purpose. [More…]

• I want to hammer the point about fund democracy. [More…]

• I think what should be paramount in our minds is that this is the Parliament of a democracy. [More…]

• If he will be kind enough to come back and listen to mc I will give him a classic illustration of the way in which democracy takes a holiday when the hospital and medical benefits funds can do and say what they like. [More…]

• We members of the Australian Labor Party say that it is the philosophy of democracy and our philosophy that there should not be civil conscription, and that we are opposed to compelling people, under a financial penalty, to join one of these funds. [More…]

• Even if we accept the Government’s argument that it is the Government’s scheme, should it not rest on fundamental democracy? [More…]

• The Government prates about democracy and consumer protection. [More…]

• If the Government errs, it should err on the side of subscriber democracy. [More…]

• Does the Government also not concede that in view of the policy of the Government of Ceylon - an important neighbour of Australia, a democracy, and a fellow member of the Commonwealth of Nations - in continuing with a policy which is clearly opposed to the policy of the Government of Ceylon we are endangering our relations with this fellow Commonwealth country? [More…]

• I recall to the minds of those honourable senators who remember the last World War that, when Britain was on her knees because of the fight that she and her allies were putting up for democracy and for the freedom of the people, she had to sell a lot of her assets in America in order to pay her commitments to America. [More…]

• That is democracy at work, I believe. [More…]

• Lord Willis said that television can bring to all the essential relaxation that they need through the medium of the best entertainment of all kinds, lt can be a truly new national playhouse and it can provide the national anvil on which new ideas may be hammered out, drawing the ordinary citizen into a closer understanding of the process of decision making, narrowing the gap between people and the executive, and acting as a stimulant to democracy. [More…]

• It is all very well for Senator Greenwood and other honourable senators opposite to talk about caucus control and so on, but there is a great deal of democracy in the Party to which 1 belong. [More…]

• In many ways the Liberal Party of Australia should emulate some of the democracy which is practised in the Labor Party. [More…]

• Honourable senators on this side of the chamber have endeavoured as much as possible to improve the status of the Parliament and to ensure that there is a restoration of parliamentary democracy iri Australia. [More…]

• lt is one of the most firmly established principles of’ British Parliamentary democracy that a House of review should not reject the financial decisions of the popular House. [More…]

• No red blooded person can concede that in any circumstances we enjoy genuine democracy in this country until such time as those provisions are repealed. [More…]

• There are times when even a Minister has to take some notice of democracy. [More…]

• I hope we still have some democracy left in Australia, although tonight’s proceedings would not resemble it too much. [More…]

• I propose again to complain about the way in which the Government has dragged democracy into the dust tonight. [More…]

• The Government is being aided and abetted in its attempt to stifle democracy, to tread the trade unions into the dust and to treat with contempt the laws of this country. [More…]

• Democracy should reign supreme but the Government is treating it with contempt. [More…]

• The 2 features which bring shame on the spirit and letter of democracy are the application of the gag and the Leader of the Government in the Senate breaking an arrangement he had with the Opposition. [More…]

• -I appreciate that that happens, but there is less democracy for the trade unions under this Bill. [More…]

• I believe that if we were still sitting here at 5 o’clock tomorrow morning or 5 o’clock next week it would be well worth the task if it meant that another such shocking burden as this would not be imposed upon the working people of Australia as has been imposed by this Bill and imposed in a way so contemptuous of the Australian Parliament, Australian democracy and the people of Australia. [More…]

• If that means travail, if that means in the words of other people a polarisation, a divisiveness in the community, and if the civilisation which democracy has created is worth while having, then its preservation should require the enforcement of the law. [More…]

• This is its report of the democracy that we are preserving in South Vietnam. [More…]

• The small numbers who went out in protest showed clearly that people were not prepared to accept this blatant attempt by the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions to oppose parliamentary democracy, and this was basically what Mr Hawke was doing. [More…]

• If we are to survive as a free enterprise democracy the strength and stability of the family unit is fundamental to our very survival. [More…]

• I believe this is most important in maintaining permanence in a free enterprise democracy. [More…]

• This we must guard against if we are to survive as a free enterprise democracy. [More…]

• The first is that the fundamental strength and security of the family unit is basic to our society in a free enterprise democracy. [More…]

• I mention the supporters of the Moratorium; the people who would bring mob action to Australia, mobs in the streets as a method of government; the people who clearly advocated, as Dr Cairns has done, that anarchy should, in effect, reign: the people like Mr Gregory who have advocated that anarchy should reign and that we should no longer have any regard for the parliamentary principle of democracy, that it is right and just for people to take over if they do not like what is being done by a government. [More…]

• A Commonwealth Minister and his Government, for example, rising in the Parliament to tell the world thai Australian democracy would be threatened by a short visit from one of America’s vocal, but non-violent, rebels. [More…]

• I would think that those people would be the last to talk about a double standard, yet they are the ones who posture as the defenders of democracy and at the same time prevent the free transit of a person into this country without producing one shred or tittle of argument to show why he should be prevented from doing so. [More…]

• In those days the old timers would look at me and say: ‘If you do away with democracy you get a dictatorship’. [More…]

• When I would reply: ‘Surely we can improve on our parliamentary system of democracy?’ [More…]

• Whatever happens it is a great tribute to the democracy of this place where Senator Sir Kenneth Anderson and myself- [More…]

• Democracy does not subsist only in speaking for a great time on a small number of subjects, but perhaps dealing with more subjects. [More…]

• Strikes and contempt for the rule of law strike a body blow at these 2 vital institutions in our system of democracy. [More…]

• It is often said - I believe that it is said with great truth - that if one wants results in a democracy in the end one has to have a public opinion that impacts upon the legislators everywhere they are meeting. [More…]

• The Premier means the Friendship Society - the Conference to End the Vietnam War (a front of another Communist body, the Peace Council), the Brisbane Committee for Democracy in Greece and has actively assisted in the organisation of two Vietnam Moratorium Campaigns. [More…]

• I give the House and the electorate at large an assurance here and now - these subversive elements will be closely watched by my Government in the future and their activities against decency and democracy exposed. [More…]

• I also advocate the restoration of democracy in Greece and I attended conferences of the committee which seeks that objective. [More…]

• No one on either side of the chamber would deny the desirability of having democracy in Greece or in any other place, yet according to Mr Bjelke-Petersen this is an indication of subversiveness and disloyalty. [More…]

• If we are not allowed to do these things this is no longer a democracy. [More…]

• I believe that the Labor Party, by identifying itself with the Moratorium campaign, has shown to the people of Australia not only that its own platform, policy and resolutions mean absolutely nothing at all but that it is prepared to align itself with Communists, it is prepared to align itself with those who want the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to win and it is prepared to align itself with those who would cheerfully see the overthrow of Australian institutions and who would cheerfully overthrow democracy, the rule of law and the basis upon which everything that has made Australia what it is has been built. [More…]

• If members opposite allow this kind of conduct to continue it will not only damage the Liberal and Country Parties, as it is damaging them, but, more importantly, it will damage democracy in Australia. [More…]

• These subversive elements will be closely watched by my Government in the future and their activities against decency and the democracy exposed. [More…]

• I believe, as was put by way of question this morning, that the whole essence of our way of life and of our democracy is for everyone to accept that we must follow the rule of law and not resort to anarchy to which some people would try to lead us. [More…]

• It is an attack upon the fundamental basis of representative democracy for an honourable senator to be accused, under privilege in a State Parliament, of subversion and disloyalty for engaging in legitimate political activities. [More…]

• I refer to the functions of the Postmaster-General’s Department as an agency of democracy in relation to expression. [More…]

• Even with the large number of people on the roll in Britain, the Post Office there is able to give that free service to democracy. [More…]

• I believe that it is throttling democracy completely. [More…]

• Tf we want democracy to function, we must have the maximum number of these small papers. [More…]

• It prostituted democracy. [More…]

• Surely the basis of parliamentary democracy is that the individual speaks about matters that are important to him and relevant to the things that have been put up to him. [More…]

• Whilst the Liberal Party does nol seem to command a great deal of support in the Australian Capital Territory, that I suppose is one of the anomalies of democracy because Canberra, as the city which it has become, has been developed under more than 20 years of successive Liberal-Country Party governments. [More…]

• But the intention was of course, for the Prime Minister, through the activities of the Government - the numbers racket of democracy - to pass the Bill before the deputation arrived. [More…]

• But, thanks to the application of the principles of democracy by Government senators and members of the Democratic Labor Party, the debate has been kept alive. [More…]

• However much Senator Young likes those nice words ‘freedoms’ and ‘democracy*, we will be moving amendments to the Bill. [More…]

• I often wonder how many sins are committed in this world in the name of democracy. [More…]

• The decision may have been made in the cause of freedom and democracy but, I believe that in respect of prices it was one of the worst decisions that people of this country ever made. [More…]

• Why do honourable senators opposite - I say this without being offensive - mouth these shibboleths of freedom and democracy when they know it would be practically impossible for Senator Young or any other wool grower to establish any person in the wool industry today at the current price of land. [More…]

• I believe thai it is vital to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy that the amendment which has been proposed by the Opposition be supported. [More…]

• This is a service to democracy. [More…]

• The Australian Administration has introduced and supported a law which makes a mockery of freedom and democracy; which is open to abuse; and has many of the aspects of [More…]

• the way as far as democracy was concerned. [More…]

• I believed that when 1 came into the Senate I would see some type of democracy at work. [More…]

• Tonight I have seen democracy at work and it has been prostituted democracy. [More…]

• I repeat that I believe we have seen democracy denied tonight. [More…]

• We believe in this country not in democracy as an end but as a means to a higher and more desirable objective and we are endeavouring to give, in a very short space of time, to the people in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea a recognition of the advantages of this democratic method. [More…]

• The whole point of what Mr Whitlam has been saying in the Territory is a negation of the developing democracy in that country and for that reason, if not for many others, his remarks are to be deplored. [More…]

• I believe that there is need for a clear recognition of the fact that Australia respects the developing democracy of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea and will respect the wishes of the local people. [More…]

• The Territory is a developing democracy. [More…]

• In showing that contempt he has exhibited an arrogance which amounts to a denial of democracy. [More…]

• I believe that we in this Senate owe it not only to the people of Australia but also to the people of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea to affirm positively that we respect their developing democracy and that we will not impose upon them self-government or independence contrary to their wishes, it is up to the Australian Labor Party to indicate clearly and emphatically whether it believes in democracy in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea or whether, contrary to democracy, it will impose the wishes of its own authoritarian party. [More…]

• One basis is the democracy owed to the people of Papua and New Guinea and apparently the second is that the Australian Labor Party is not observing its policy. [More…]

• If honourable senator.applied their minds purely to policy they might say that it is a disgrace that, in the year that was set aside to consider the whole topic of human rights, Australia, Which once had a proud position in the advancement of democracy and its contributions to human rights, was not cosponsor to one motion. [More…]

• I believe that it will, be aoneparty state, as is the position in nearly every state in Africa, where the trappings of democracy may be maintained but stark autarchy is the method by which the governments operate and the people cower under the heel of single party governments which arc reinforced by secret police and often a brutal military command. [More…]

• By opposing this resolution tonight the Labor Party clearly states that it does not believe in democracy, does not believe in the freely expressed will of the people. [More…]

• They chatter about democracy. [More…]

• They do not even understand what democracy means. [More…]

• As Senator Sir Magnus Cormack pointed out, a Socialist does not believe in democracy. [More…]

• I move this motion on behalf of the Opposition because 1 believe it is time that the Senate asserted its rightful role in democracy. [More…]

• If honourable senators opposite do not help us to carry this motion, then woe .betide them, because on any occasion on which they carry a motion the Executive will be able to ride over them in complete disregard of their wishes, aDd consequently democracy will be at the crossroads. [More…]

• If any democrat were io allow such a challenge to succeed he would be helping to destroy the very basis of his democracy. [More…]

• By what warrant and with what justification in terms of law and democracy are Mr Hawke, the ACTU and the Australian Workers Union entitled to say whether 300 sheep should be exported? [More…]

• I ask the Minister ‘ to do these things, because they are very important to democracy within Australia. [More…]

• Therefore I believe the Senate has a very important responsibility to fulfil in order to preserve the parliamentary system of government and parliamentary democracy in Australia. [More…]

• I support the proposal that has been put forward on the notice paper because I believe that, the Committee system is in the interests of the Parliament and the Australian people and that it should be encouraged to ensure the preservation of parliamentary democracy in this nation. [More…]

• This focuses attention on an extremely important principle of parliamentary democracy and of representative government, the genesis of which, so far as this Parliament is concerned, occurred in the Senate last year during consideration of the Parliamentary Counsel Bill. [More…]

• I do not care what it is called but the Australian Government calls that democracy. [More…]

• Can anyone believe that it is democracy when 85 per cent of the people are Taiwanese and are allowed only a 3 per cent token representation in their House of [More…]

• fs that democracy? [More…]

• In a democracy every citizen should be free, within limits imposed by laws designed to strike a reasonable balance between conflicting interests, to give expression to his views or to his sentiments by the process of peaceful assembly, lt must be recognised that the right to dissent carries with it, as one of its aspects, a right to use that process. [More…]

• By not giving the Opposition this opportunity the Government is making a bit of a mockery of democracy. [More…]

• democratic government, some semblance of democracy, in this country. [More…]

• Democracy does not mean governmentby the majority; it means government by the majority with due respect to the minority. [More…]

• The fact that people, especially the young, feel strongly enough about public issues to want to proclaim their opinions publicly in the streets is something which should be applauded by those who care for the health of democracy, not whittled down further as is proposed by this Bill. [More…]

• In a democracy, as everybody has said tonight, every citizen should be free, but he should be free within limits imposed by laws that are designed to maintain a reasonable balance between conflicting interests. [More…]

• It cannot be denied that the freedom to express individual opinions and ideas and to join with others in such an expression is a basic right in our democracy. [More…]

• Democracy must ensure that the right to change the law is maintained but the claim that freedom depends on breaking the law must be rejected completely. [More…]

• It was put before the people as a great principle of democracy that people should have this right and that the anti-litter law should not interfere with it. [More…]

• What should come first in a democracy is the right of peaceful assembly, the right to dissent. [More…]

• If we want the true basis of democracy, every person in this national Parliament must be able to express himself clearly, according to his conscience and in the spirit that what he is doing is in the best interests of this country. [More…]

• I believe you have never allowed yourself to forget that before another century is out it will be the home of our outstanding democracy, the only democracy of note in the southern hemisphere. [More…]

• Senator Wright quite rightly referred to this great democracy in the Southern Hemisphere. [More…]

• We show our admiration for democracy by working in a temporary building. [More…]

• We cannot blame people who visit us and say: ‘These people are not that enthusiastic about democracy because they have not built a permanent place to work in’. [More…]

• After all, we live in a democracy and even this Government may have some difficulty in surviving until August for all we know. [More…]

• It would be a disaster for democracy if I were prevented from speaking about this matter. [More…]

• The position which applies throughout the Australian democracy is that Ministers are chosen by the Governor-General. [More…]

• I am seriously suggesting that if the Government continues with this attitude through this Budget session then it ought to call it off and have an election so that some form of democracy can be returned to Australia. [More…]

• It is a denial of democracy when the Government cuts across our Standing Orders and the principles that have been established and shortens the period allowed for question time. [More…]

• I hope that the procedure which was adopted today will not be pursued in the future because there are many people in Australia who want democracy to operate as it should operate and not as the Government believes is best for this country. [More…]

• In view of the recent experiences of his predecessor in negotiations with the Hospital Contribution Fund of Australia and the Medical Benefits Fund of Australia on membership contribution rates and the subsequent comments by the New South Wales Minister for Health, Mr Jago, and myself that all funds should consult their members in such critical negotiations, will the Minister legislate for fund democracy which, in the case of those 2 funds, is non-existent? [More…]

• The honourable senator asks me to give a judgment on the very important issue of the democracy that exists within the various funds, whether they be hospital contribution funds, medical benefits funds a Hibernian Society fund or any fund. [More…]

• The proposition is that there should be democracy in some funds and not in other funds? [More…]

• That is a negation of all that our democracy and our parliamentary system stand for. [More…]

• Democracy is government by the people, and government by the people demands action by the people, lt demands effective ways of showing what the interests and needs of the people really are. [More…]

• He said other things too and those things were related to democracy being expressed in the factories, in the streets and in public places wherever people are to be found. [More…]

• It is that some unrepresentative bosses, representative of and responsible to nobody, should decide who ought to make these decisions and that, of course, is a negation of democracy. [More…]

• Nothing is wrong with this in a democracy, provided that the decencies are not overstepped. [More…]

• Equally, the Opposition has this right in respect of its own affairs; it has responsibilities in a democracy as we have. [More…]

• When the happy day comes and there is an election, the people will reaffirm what they have reaffirmed every time since 1949, namely, that our way of government in a democracy is a better way than the system advocated by the Opposition, and it will give stability to the people of Australia. [More…]

• It is reasonable as a matter of democracy for the Australian Democratic Labor Party to be represened on this Committee. [More…]

• Has the Government made any approach to the Siagon regime about this abysmal lack of democratic process following Australia’s contribution of 470 Australians dead and a great sum of money expended for the so called maintenance of democracy? [More…]

• I ask him again: Has the Australian Government protested about the undemocratic election to be held in South Vietnam where President Thieu has effectively ensured that the election will be a travesty of democracy? [More…]

• Another is Mr McLeay, whose main contribution to democracy in this country has been to go to the African countries and say that Australia - particularly the churches - is riddled with Communists. [More…]

• It was these sentiments that gave impetus to the establishment of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• 1 believe there cannot be genuine democracy as long as parliament and the public are unable to obtain genuine, detailed and reliable information concerning every aspect of our national life. [More…]

• Let me say that I am a believer in the democratic processes - action by the parliament - action by the people - but I doubt the efficacy of the sham democracy - the superficial democracy that is claimed to be the foundation stone of our society. [More…]

• Democracy demands that a substantial proportion of the electors shall be informed, educated and actively involved in matters of public importance. [More…]

• The awareness of these traditions and the long and illustrious line of people who have upheld them in the interests of freedom and democracy makes me humble because I realise the privilege and the double responsibility which has been bestowed upon me. [More…]

• Has the Government received from champions of democracy in Australia any request to deny admittance to Soviet sporting or cultural’ bodies, such as the Russian ballet, until the Soviet Union changes such policies? [More…]

• Is it not correct to say that the Commonwealth Government sold democracy down the drain when it failed to give the Australian Cricket Board of Control a lead to continue the tour of the South African cricketers? [More…]

• Does the Government’s bowing down to the demonstrators on this occasion mean that, in the event of demonstrators entering the chambers of this Parliament and shouting, tinging bells and blowing whistles, the parliamentary business will be closed down, which would be regarded as another success by the demonstrators but which would strike another blow against democracy? [More…]

• We are losing sight of democracy in this country. [More…]

• If someone does not have a good look very soon at what is happening in Australia democracy here will cease to exist. [More…]

• This situation has been brought about by a government which claims to be guiding Papua New Guinea towards .independence and democracy. [More…]

• As hundreds of Australian conscripts have been killed in South Vietnam while allegedly fighting to preserve democracy and as Air Vice-Marshal Ky was until recently held in high regard by the Australian Government, why has this Government done nothing about his allegations of a lack of democracy in the South Vietnam presidential election? [More…]

• This is not good for democracy, for Parliament or, most certainly, for stability of government. [More…]

• When we become so subdued that we cannot express a point of view - be it as a result of a decision of a caucus, a government leader or a Party leader - we reduce democracy to a miserable farce. [More…]

• It will be their responsibility in the future to maintain democracy in this country. [More…]

• But the freedom of that man to speak for 4 hours is very important within the portals of Parliament where democracy exists, or is alleged to exist. [More…]

• Any one of us could state a belief that a person has spoken for too long because we have not enjoyed or followed properly his speech, but his right to speak is paramount if we are to adhere to the system of democracy in this country. [More…]

• This Parliament is the focal point of democracy in this country. [More…]

• We have to remember that in this democracy of ours people are of different types and have different ways. [More…]

• Possibly democracy is so important that it is necessary to take more time to debate matters in a democratic way than was taken in the past. [More…]

• If a number of people feel that they want to have a say on some matter on which they feel strongly, I think democracy demands that they be given sufficient time to debate the matter. [More…]

• I believe that full debates in this chamber are important to the democracy of this country. [More…]

• This was a genuine attempt to preserve freedom of democracy in this chamber. [More…]

• It is the only parliamentary democracy of any significance in the area. [More…]

• A community which is in a free society, a democracy, running through the parliamentary system, has some very basic principles which it must follow. [More…]

• I put 2 basic principles of democracy. [More…]

• I say that no person in a democracy has the right to seek more freedom or liberty for himself than he is willing to grant to his neighbour. [More…]

• Indeed, freedom and democracy have been made, by corruption, words and weapons of war at this moment. [More…]

• Does the Australian Government consider that it is democracy when voters wanting to vote against Thieu had to place their ballot papers in a different box from those voting in his favour and under the eyes of heavily armed soldiers? [More…]

• Does the Australian Government consider that it is democracy when voters are forced to the polls to retrieve their identity cards, which is a sure way of ensuring a high percentage attendance at polling booths? [More…]

• The Leader of the Opposition has asked me to give an opinion about the process of democracy in South Vietnam. [More…]

• Democracy has varying shades and degrees. [More…]

• We in the free world, particularly in Australia, have developed a high degree of democracy. [More…]

• As a democracy, Vietnam is a young country. [More…]

• Its people are developing democracy. [More…]

• I do not think that there is a blueprint for democracy which states that circumstances in all countries are the same. [More…]

• But I come back to what I said at the outset, that democracy is not an absolute thing in its forms. [More…]

• I think the free world is delighted to know that Asian countries are developing a process of democracy. [More…]

• That is the perversion of democracy and the perversion of parliament. [More…]

• Senator Georges is a well known name in this country as a fighter for freedom and democracy. [More…]

• Indeed, freedom and democracy have been made, by corruption, words and weapons of war at this moment. [More…]

• It was supposed to be saving democracy. [More…]

• Last weekend we saw the greatest farce of democracy ever seen in a country that was supposed to be a free country. [More…]

• One would have though, seeing Australia has been involved in Vietnam since 1966 and seeing that the Americans were there before us in this same rotten war, that democracy would have been restored today. [More…]

• But what happened to them in this great democracy, in this time of trade unionism, freedom and liberty? [More…]

• He talked about democracy and about the people being able to change the government of this country. [More…]

• Let us see how the Government has prostituted democracy in this country. [More…]

• Do honourable senators opposite call that a democracy? [More…]

• lt puts Australia in a highly desirable position from the point of view of focusing in Saigon interest in Western democracy. [More…]

• That is an attitude which is completely subversive to every fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy as well as being subversive to the security of this nation. [More…]

• He was talking about the 2 basic principles of democracy, the first one which does not concern us at the moment. [More…]

• At that time we were told that the whole future of this nation, the safety and security of Australians and the preservation of democracy, Christianity and our Judeo-Hellenic heritage depended upon the dispatching of 20-year-old conscripts to Vietnam. [More…]

• We were told that opposed to these commissars was our great and powerful ally, the United States of America, steadfastly determined to oppose Communism and to support democracy even if supporting democracy meant sending troops into the Dominican Republic to depose a democratically elected president. [More…]

• Nothing would inhibit the United States of America in its desire to maintain democracy, so dedicated was it to this great proposition. [More…]

• We were told that not only would we preserve this democracy in Vietnam but also we would save other small countries from aggression. [More…]

• We have not sent troops to North Vietnam and we have not sent troops to China in order to carry out some wild claim that we would preserve democracy. [More…]

• We are not involved in this at all but you remember several years ago when the war in Vietnam was on, when we were saving the one candidate presidential democracy of South Vietnam, that the Australians sent 8,000 conscripts up to South Vietnam. [More…]

• President Nixon deals with a lot of hard headed businessmen who have never believed all of this nonsense about dominoes falling over and saving democracy in South Vietnam. [More…]

• I received a document which I was assured outlined what the Belgians call subscriber democracy. [More…]

• Will the Minister inform the Senate whether it is true that a request has been made to Australia to leave Australian servicemen in Vietnam as advisers to train Cambodians, presumably for the defence of the Government of Lon Nol, the dictator who has dispensed with parliamentary democracy and is operating under martial law? [More…]

• When one looks at the 35 nations which voted against the expulsion of the Taipeh Government and the admission of China, one finds Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti - a great democracy - Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. [More…]

• There are those who say that the records of Australian Democratic Labor Party senators are important to a discussion of this magnitude What has history taught us of those countries which have no democracy today? [More…]

• Apart from asking for our aid, Malaysia has to find solutions to its problems and give its people a form of democracy which will be lasting. [More…]

• As Thailand has now followed Cambodia in the process of non-democratic government will the Australian Government, which has used men and money to support so-called democracy in South Vietnam, make public its displeasure at the way in which democracy is being challenged by our former allies in Indo-China? [More…]

• We have played our part in devastating a small peasant country in the name of democracy. [More…]

• This Liberal and Country Party Government went into a country where the troubles were a legacy of history, where the solutions were to have reforms, to have democracy, to have land reform, and to have equalisation of wealth. [More…]

• Then we saw a continuance of a farce of democracy which did not last for too long because we have seen the fraud that has been perpetrated in recent times. [More…]

• I have always felt that it was one of the fundamentals of our type of parliamentary democracy that we should at no stage involve the armed Services in politics. [More…]

• If he desires to hold the opinions that he does of the Democratic Labor Party we concede to him in this democracy the right to do so. [More…]

• In the course of his most interesting speech, the Prime Minister dealt comprehensively with the parliamentary system of government in Malaysia and the Malaysian concept of democracy which had been evolved - not merely a formal matter, I may say. [More…]

• The main heads of subjects discussed at the Conference were: The Commonwealth and Problems of World Security; Problems of the Environment; Challenges to Parliamentary Democracy; and Economic Development. [More…]

• That cannot be defended in a democracy. [More…]

• I ask honourable senators to recognise that in a democracy a minority voice, as we hapen to be at this moment in the Senate, has placed upon it under the Senate committee system a much heavier burden than that which is imposed on the major parties. [More…]

• That is democracy at work. [More…]

• They are rejected, as they rightly should be in a democracy. [More…]

• We do this because we find that if we base our party on democracy we have to practise democracy. [More…]

• You cannot have the essence of democracy both ways. [More…]

• If we are prepared to run the gauntlet of public criticism obviously that is the essence of democracy. [More…]

• If we are to preserve our democracy the highest department in this country must be the Parliament of the people. [More…]

• Another point that greatly disturbs me is that this Bill, which to my mind offends against all human rights and political democracy, will receive passage through this chamber: but if this legislation were in the form of a regulation it would never be approved by the Regulations and Ordinances Committee. [More…]

• He was a lover of democracy, its parliamentary procedures and its national application. [More…]

• We talk about the development and potential of our great young country and yet if we subscribe to the views of the Australian Labor Party on the subject of defence we indicate that all the things that have been achieved over the years matter very little to us and that we are content, prepared and willing to hand them all over to anyone who is prepared to challenge the continuation of a democracy in Australia. [More…]

• If we do nothing we are likely to be left to languish in the wreckage caused by our own shortcomings, our own lack of vision and our own lack of resolution to preserve for the future generations of Australians democracy that you, Mr President, and I have enjoyed. [More…]

• I have heard people at the United Nations in New York declaiming the wickedness of the South Africans and proclaiming democracy, justice, freedom and the rights of man. [More…]

• The Labor Party will co-operate in the development of South-East Asia and the Pacific and Indian Ocean areas to strengthen the fabric of peace and freedom and to uphold the principles of democracy, individual liberty ::nd the rule of law and to promote economic well-being and development [More…]

• How absurd in a democracy for grown men to suggest that if a contravention of the law is incurred consciously by a man, and he appears before a magistrate and that law requires that as an alternative to 2 years compulsory military service he should be subjected to 18 months civil imprisonment, they should say: T refuse to do the military service because 1 consider that the Act is unjust’. [More…]

• It is a basic principle of our democracy, and of the democracy of the United States, whatever weaknesses there may be in the United States - there are myriad weaknesses in the United States - that there is a rule of law to be followed, and the President of the United States and the Attorney-General of the United States would never dream of doing the sorts of things, except by inadvertence as I believe was the case in relation to President Nixon’s comments, that this Attorney-General has done since he has held this office. [More…]

• We would not be sitting in a parliament today debating this subject if people had not disobeyed laws deliberately lo ensure the future of democracy and to ensure that democracy can exist. [More…]

• We have example after example of people disobeying bad laws for the right of democracy to exist and to continue. [More…]

• In this great democracy of ours the Government says that the law is good in every respect because a government has legislated it and put it on the statutes book. [More…]

• That is not democracy. [More…]

• If there is to be democracy, we are entitled to have our matters dealt with. [More…]

• Mr President, I claim as a matter of democracy that we are entitled to a vote on this Bill. [More…]

• Government senators and those who for some purpose or other are not willing to have the matter put to a vo’.e ought to recognise that, if there is some democracy, we are entitled to have a vote on this Bill. [More…]

• 1 suggest that if there is any decent approach to legislative matters and any pretence at democracy at least 1 ought to be entitled to have the matter voted upon. [More…]

• Let us talk about democracy. [More…]

• This is democracy. [More…]

• But is it not a prostitution of democracy when some people in big board rooms overseas virtually can nobble the Australian Government’s trade policy? [More…]

• He said: ‘There is no democracy in our country but there is in America’. [More…]

• Democracy does exist under the coalition, which is contrary to the situation in some other areas that we know of in this world. [More…]

• What we have to recognise is that in this democracy of ours we are dependent upon each other. [More…]

• What is involved here is a serious question in relation to the operation of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• In the interests of the Government, the Opposition and the people of Australia a full and frank answer is required from the Government as to whether democracy should work in Australia in this clandestine fashion or whether the traditional open democracy which has been practised in Australia should continue. [More…]

• It was virtually the flushing out of traitors of democracy. [More…]

• It is a ridiculous assertion to suggest that a body which is concerned with Australia’s defence, the maintenance of Australia’s freedom and the alerting of the people of Australia to the menace of communism should in some way be regarded as manipulating democracy. [More…]

• I am grateful to the Labor Party for having raised this matter because, instead of referring to anonymous documents, instead of referring to those people who have said something but who are not prepared to put their name to it and instead of using this place as the means by which to defame, slander and denigrate people outside the Parliament who do not have the opportunity that members of Parliament have of saying what they would like to say in this place, we should look at the record of one organisation which has manipulated democracy in this country, which has been declared by a very well known and established Australian organisation to have so manipulated democracy and which has, when certain political advantages have been achieved, and the cloak has been removed, told us that it has not manipulated democracy in the way in which the original condemnation had it. [More…]

• I would only say in respect of Mr Cairns, because the comment has been made, that I know and his colleagues know that he is a person who supports the Liberal Party, who supports democracy, who believes in freedom and who opposes communism. [More…]

• I admire Senator Murphy’s tender solicitude for democracy. [More…]

• The suggestion that it is a secret organisation working for the destruction of democracy is so absurd that I feel that the Leader of the Opposition must have been joking. [More…]

• He is worried about the attack on democracy in Australia. [More…]

• Let us face it; it is the science of numbers that destroys democracy. [More…]

• It is not as though the report already has not been ruminated upon in the false stomach of the Committee before it comes into this chamber, and this, in my view, in a form of participative democracy gives greater opportunity for worthwhile discussion than can be given in a debate in this chamber. [More…]

• To take it a little further, we could say that in Australia, through the avenue of the Statute of Westminster, we certainly did achieve political democracy. [More…]

• This raises the question of whether it is democracy as we know it to protect the public - whether we must protect the public interest for our own preservation. [More…]

• This motion could result in a short-circuiting of the processes of public debate; a short-circuiting of the processes of democracy and a short-circuiting of the opportunities of members of this House to express their views adequately and properly. [More…]

• It has now been proposed that the time limit be reduced by one-third and Senator Young has suggested as a natural corollary to agreeing to such a proposal that there should be a reduction of onethird in the time limit of all speakers in such a debate, lt would be making a joke of the whole procedure of democracy if this motion were carried. [More…]

• We speak very loosely about democracy. [More…]

• We believe that democracy is the greatest system. [More…]

• Many of the emerging countries which have tried democracy have finished up with a form of government that nobody in a democracy wants - a military dictatorship. [More…]

• The fact is that many of these countries are evolving and are now being maintained under military dictatorships, one country that has clung to democracy is India, with all the problems of its more than 500 million people. [More…]

• If he feels that he has been justified in putting the Commonwealth Police into this position by his haste, not only should he apologise to them but also he should apologise to Chris Shanley 1 say in conclusion that I quite understand the concern of Senator Turnbull that we should see before our own eyes in the precincts of Parliament House, the centre of democracy in this country, this fascistlike conduct. [More…]

• When members of the Opposition denigrate the police, they do not harm the police; they harm the Parliament and, through that, they harm democracy. [More…]

• When we examine the Government’s case we see that it expresses a great deal of concern for democracy. [More…]

• If the Government is interested in democracy, I suggest that it should apply democratic principles right across the board. [More…]

• So I find it somewhat hypocritical of the Government to say that it is concerned with democracy and with the rights of members of trade unions, when the members of these important organisations, which are concerned with the medical and hospital rights of contributors, have no say in the running of the organisations. [More…]

• Any suggestion by the Government that there is any concern for democracy in respect of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act is not borne out in practice. [More…]

• If the Government is so concerned about this great democratic method of election it should move quickly to that end, with the co-operation of State parliaments, to ensure that this system of so-called democracy is available to all. [More…]

• I am hoping too that legislation will be enacted to protect the rights of shareholders and give them some feeling, some element of democracy. [More…]

• If it is claimed by Government supporters - I deny this - that no democracy exists within the trade union movement, and if it is claimed that the ordinary . [More…]

• For instance, I feel that in this area there exists no democracy because the small shareholder in a company in this country has very few rights, nor does he have what we consider to be a democratic right. [More…]

• Whatever there is wrong with the United States, at least it pays a little more than the lip service which is paid in this country to democracy. [More…]

• I do not think the process of democracy is being furthered by engaging in a long debate on a subject on which we are all in agreement. [More…]

• With great respect, I say that it is the right and privilege of journalists in a free democracy to speculate in that way and I believe that the honourable senator ought so to regard the comments to which he has referred. [More…]

• Our percentage of unemployment, even at the present rate of 2 per cent, is infinitely better than that of any other Western democracy, particularly the United States of America and the United Kingdom which have suffered unemployment to the extent of 5 or 6 per cent of their immense work force - in the United States now for several years and in the United Kingdom for 3 or 4 years. [More…]

• Nothing has been said by the Commonwealth Government about the assault that has taken place on democracy in Queensland during the last few ‘weeks. [More…]

• It shows what is democracy’. [More…]

• I have pleaded repeatedly with Senator Sir Kenneth Anderson and asked when he is going to bring democracy into the operations of these massive fund organisations. [More…]

• There is no difference in my book between democracy in the board rooms, democracy for stock . [More…]

• holders or democracy in the trade union movement. [More…]

• During the oil industry dispute Sir Robert Askin did not do a service to democracy by demeaning John Ducker but now, for cheap, snivelling political purposes, Government supporters suddenly put him and Bob Hawke up as paragons of virtue. [More…]

• That is the way in which a democracy develops. [More…]

• As to our system of government, I heard what he said, and it is not convenient tonight to expatriate upon it except to notice that this Bill and the request that underlies it - a request to remove the limitation on the number of members who should occupy executive office - seem to indicate that the House of Assembly of the Territory is readily following in the footsteps of the democracy by which it has been guided. [More…]

• If fundamental requirements for more democracy and freedom were set out in a letter from the Government to Mr Clunies-Ross in 1968, why has the Government failed to ensure Mr Clunies-Ross’s compliance with those directives so that the islanders could be freed from this so-called benevolent despotism? [More…]

• Please God that sanity will reign here in this democracy and there will be enough people in this country to suppress this element which is trying to gain control of Australia. [More…]

• There is a great need for a change of government if democracy, as we should define it, is to be maintained in this country. [More…]

• full and responsible participation in our American democracy. [More…]

• If we are to have a responsive government and a government that is sensitive to the will of the people then the system of democracy should be such that the government can be readily changed. [More…]

• I think that the Leader of the Opposition’s proposition is a very valid one and one which ought to be observed if there is to be any sort of democracy in this Parliament and in this country. [More…]

• Thirdly, Western democracy is the cornerstone upon which the state will be erected. [More…]

• Let us make it quite clear: The rule of law in the kind of democracy that we follow is one that, being made in this Parliament, is a charge upon every member of this Parliament to obey. [More…]

• The concepts of democracy must be right across the board. [More…]

• In a democracy, how those people decide to get their amusement compared with other people is their own business. [More…]

• I suppose that one of the real tests of a democracy is whether a person sent here by his electorate is allowed to vote as he thinks best for his electorate or whether he should vote as he is told to vote by somebody who has not been elected. [More…]

• The High Court expressed the view that it was not its prerogative to interpret the Constitution but that the Parliament, being the supreme body in a democracy, should grasp this problem and deal with it. [More…]

• Do not make hasty decisions on what you think are the political moves and attitudes of a democracy today, because unless you are prepared to abolish democracy you will receive a check in the future, which will surprise you. [More…]

• This is what I meant when I said that, after all, we cannot have a millenium because we must sometimes temper democracy to the stage where we make it work. [More…]

• After all, democracy is a fantastic ideal. [More…]

• It is not that I disagree with what Senator Little has had to say because I think that the greater part if not the whole of what he had to say, except his conclusion, ought to command the support o anyone in this chamber who thinks about democracy and its meaning. [More…]

• He said that democracy had to be tempered in order to make it work. [More…]

• Reflection will indicate that democracy, in the sense in which it has meaning and is traditionally practised involves people. [More…]

• Our system is really representative democracy. [More…]

• To make representative democracy work there has to be a limitation on the number of representatives. [More…]

• There is a single member constituency which is the traditional one under which our parliamentary democracy in the Westminster tradition has developed or there is the system which has its origin more on the continent of Europe than in the United Kingdom of having a multi-member constituency. [More…]

• I think it would be dangerous in the extreme to the workings of our democracy to have the same system prevailing in each House of the Parliament. [More…]

• For the reason I have indicated, namely, that democracy must be made to work, and because it would be foolhardy to have precisely the same system applying in both chambers, I believe that as we have proportional representation in the Senate, we should retain single member constituencies in the House of Representatives. [More…]

• For those reasons, I feel that the case which the Democratic Labor Party has made in support of its amendment is not a case which will make our representative democracy work in the effective way that it must work to maintain its public acceptance. [More…]

• The second is the more substantive question of whether the functioning of our democracy is to be served by the granting of the vote at this time and, for my part, in the immediately foreseeable future, to persons between 18 and 21 years of age. [More…]

• But I believe in compulsory voting because I believe the most important function in any democracy is for people to exercise the duty of determining which of the opposing parties they prefer as the party by which they should be governed, I think it makes, theoretically or philosophically, for a sounder base for our democratic system than any of the systems under which there is voluntary voting. [More…]

• 1 am in favour of compulsory voting for reasons which 1 feel I have outlined and because I believe it makes our system of democracy more meaningful for the people who participate in it. [More…]

• Democracy predicates the equal rights of people who live in the democracy. [More…]

• Indeed it is amazing that some of us still believe in democracy. [More…]

• I am glad that Senator Greenwood is present to hear my remarks because I think that he, of all members of the Government, is the one who is called upon the most to introduce some clarity in these dark places, in the interests of the Australian community, and to state that both the major parties are dedicated to the upholding of democracy and are in no way tainted by - I cannot remember the exact words of Mr Sinclair - this fossil from the past, this ugly spectre of fascism. [More…]

• He is only conducting it through this place on behalf of another Minister, but he knows full well from his own experience on the Regulations and Ordinances Committee that that body is an essential instrument to preserve democracy in this country. [More…]

• This is a great tribute not only to the people of Australia but also to our way of government in our democracy - and, I might say. [More…]

• it is a tribute to those who have had the responsibility of government in our democracy. [More…]

• I am sure honourable senators will join me in conveying sympathy to the families and associates of those former members of this Parliament, each of whom contributed in his own way to the growth of democracy in this country. [More…]

• Yet the Liberal Party senators are the people who talk of democracy. [More…]

• Then appears a classic of guided democracy by the Country-Liberal Party coalition in Queensland. [More…]

• Let us look at the democracy that is applied in that direction. [More…]

• Having done so they have taken democracy unto themselves. [More…]

• Therefore, to claim that the Government is following the will of the people would be a dangerous precedent for a democratic country; just as dangerous as the spectacle of this Australian democracy being controlled by a 2-man Government. [More…]

• I think that to do so is to do a disservice to democracy. [More…]

• Perhaps somebody may think that something we have said is wrong but at least it will be healthy democracy. [More…]

• Mr Menzies went on to say: lt is understandable that some Yugoslav migrants of Croatian origin should continue to hope for the establishment of an independent Croatia and within a democracy like Australia they have a Tight to advocate their views so long as they do so by legitimate means. [More…]

• For that reason, I believe he has made a major contribution to democracy in this country. [More…]

• Apparently their concept of democracy is having a political police force whose activities are secret to the Attorney-General. [More…]

• To do that is to strike at the fundamental roots of democracy and at the principle that a Government should stand up to its activities. [More…]

• It is the science of numbers which destroys democracy. [More…]

• I cannot overstate the value of question time to a democracy and the functioning of Parliament. [More…]

• The Opposition does not see in this proposition any protection coming from the great guardians of democracy who are now in government. [More…]

• The fact that we can go out and get their support, or the Opposition Parties can go and get their support, is the essence of democracy. [More…]

• We have faced a most impossible position and the Parliament of this democracy was faced with something like the siege of Wounded Knee. [More…]

• It is an objective actually achieved in the United Kingdom and in Australia and which has been regarded as being of great importance to the preservation of democracy in our type of country - a country such as Great Britain - a country such as Australia. [More…]

• 1 rejoice that in this Senate democracy still has a chance. [More…]

• These documents exhort a behaviour which is repugnant to Australia, repugnant to democracy and against everything that we stand for in this country. [More…]

• Every Australian citizen who believes in fair play, who believes in democracy, who does not believe in rule by the gun or thuggery- [More…]

• These amendments provide an opportunity for this Parliament to assert the principle of equality in our democracy - to say whether people in the city are just as equal as the people in the country - not more, not less. [More…]

• But in the interests of democracy we cannot tolerate a decision which would mean the minority could call the Senate together. [More…]

• They may be able to justify it on the basis of democracy or as related to the role of each honourable senator who is elected from the States. [More…]

• lt puzzles me mostly to find that honourable senators opposite must take this matter up time and time again when it is as plain as a pikestaff to the Australian public that the greatest disservice done to any democracy is that done by men in authority who refuse to provide the strongest weapon which any democracy has to defend itself against attack, namely, the weapon of information. [More…]

• Accommodation for the Press has been provided in the interests of democracy and to allow full and open reporting of the debates in both Houses of Parliament. [More…]

• The sign of a true democracy is that people can walk in freedom. [More…]

• That seems to me to be not only reasonable but also the essence of democracy. [More…]

• It is not the role of the Opposition in any democracy operating under the British system. [More…]

• I doubt whether there has ever been such a similar exhibition of diplomatic gullibility, stupidity and foolishness in all the post war years on the part of a supposedly advanced democracy. [More…]

• The existence of a committee of inquiry would reassure these people that Australia has not been turned completely into a police state; that while the rule of law exists and our parliamentary democracy functions, wrongs can be remedied in a non-violent, correct manner. [More…]

• It is a quaint little habit in this society of oura - I ask the AttorneyGeneral to deny it - that in a parliament and in a democracy we accept the innocence of people until they are proved guilty. [More…]

• If I want support for my arguments that today the Government is embracing tyranny and that it fails to understand the very conceptof democracy then the yells, screams and attempts to frustrate my speech from the honourable senators have provided that support. [More…]

• Unfortunately, in Australia today, if one attacks the former friends and allies of this country - those who have the same type of democracy as Australia has - one is applauded. [More…]

• These people may disagree with the policies followed in their home country and decide to migrate to Australia because they have been told that it is a democracy, a country in which they can live in freedom. [More…]

• They are the ones who are guilty of the breakdown of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Is that what parliamentary democracy is about, that those votes would have automatically been for the adoption of the motion? [More…]

• At the same time, we insist on democracy in the government of these larger groupings. [More…]

• Participatory Democracy [More…]

• Participatory democracy will be an essential ingredient for the proper functioning of the amalgamated unions. [More…]

• This is a complete negation of democracy. [More…]

• In a democracy such a result is unacceptable. [More…]

• This is the system supported by the Government and it is a system which an ALP committee says is unacceptable in a democracy. [More…]

• If one examines the Country Party’s policy on this matter and also the electoral rigging that goes on in the State of Victoria, which is due mainly to the influence of the Country Party, its idea of democracy makes one’s hair stand on end. [More…]

• This is the kind of democracy thai the parties in power in those 2 States like. [More…]

• I ask clear thinking senators to vote for this legislation so that Australia may come closer to true democracy in its electoral system. [More…]

• It is interesting that in Canada - a country with many similarities to Australia, and a great democracy - under the 1965 Redistribution of Representation in the House of Commons Act a variation of not more than 25 per cent is provided. [More…]

• This is the very negation of democracy. [More…]

• Mother of Parliaments, the home of democracy. [More…]

• If we believe in a 2-party parliamentary system, if we believe in democracy, if we believe that Parliament should be responsive to the will of the people, it is necessary that we give to the commissioners who are responsible for redistribution guidelines which will enable them to present us with a redistribution which gives equal value to each electorate. [More…]

• The result is the type of chaos which occurred in France and which led to a guided democracy and then a virtual dictatorship. [More…]

• Speech after speech was delivered on that occasion as to how this was the very essence of democracy. [More…]

• Billy Hughes was speaking about the kind of people whom I have heard delivering high principled speeches about how important it was that all the tenets of democracy should be observed to the utmost. [More…]

• At the last election we received the overwhelming number of votes and for the first time, thank goodness, despite the gerrymander of the honourable senator’s Party in 1965, the electoral weight of the people was so much against the then Government that they threw it out of office and now we are trying to bring parliamentary democracy back into the Australian electorate by reducing the 20 per cent disparity to what was normal custom, practice and tradition until 1965. [More…]

• Let us look at this system of first past the post voting which the Labor Party claims is the essence of democracy. [More…]

• This is relevant because this Government is endeavouring to gerrymander itself into power permanently, and I can think of nothing worse for democracy. [More…]

• My point is that the Government’s contempt for democracy extends into this Parliament, and therefore this chamber must be very careful about accepting any proposed amendments to the Electoral Act which would perpetuate this Government in office. [More…]

• The test of the value of the present Bill is whether its provisions advance the cause of democracy. [More…]

• If an honourable senator is to conduct himself in this way and speaks in that fashion - and I repeat that Senator Kane is the greatest political accident that ever sat in this chamber - 1 wonder where parliamentary democracy is going. [More…]

• One of the drawbacks in a democracy is that, being a numbers game, the interests of minority groups are not protected. [More…]

• It is necessary to build a mechanism into a democracy to ensure that minorities get a say. [More…]

• That is why it is necessary in a democracy to build in some protective mechanism. [More…]

• These are the areas where democracy fails. [More…]

• I suppose that right through the history of representative government and democracy there has always been at least an underlying assumption that one person’s opinion is worth that of another person simply because there is no ultimate standard by which we can make these judgments. [More…]

• Once one breaks down that principle one breaks down the whole principle of democracy, and every person in this chamber knows that. [More…]

• But immediately we destroy the concept of one vote one value, we destroy our belief in democracy and we could finish up with a fascist state, or one electorate of Australia or, as someone suggested, one party in Australia. [More…]

• Immediately we tamper with the people’s House and depart from the concept of one vote one value, we destroy the democracy in which we all believe. [More…]

• For example, it was at the age of 21 that a person was entitled to exercise the franchise and to vote in a democracy at elections. [More…]

• They are entitled, within all the limits of our democracy, to seek to change the view of the legislature in which the powers are vested by the people to make decisions on behalf of all the people. [More…]

• If the honourable senator’s belief in democracy is such that two honourable senators from one side and no one from the other side should have a go, then I disagree with his contention. [More…]

• That is, of course, so much arrogant poppycock from somebody whose estimation of his capacity is so great that he believes that he does not need the endorsement of the people in this democracy. [More…]

• It is a matter which should be regretted by anybody who believes in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If it is true, as Labor senators in this chamber said when in Opposition, that the idea of the Senate Estimates Committee is, ‘through the Ministers, to be able to draw out of the departmental officers the facts, the thinking of the departments, to get a participatory democracy between members of the Public Service and this Parliament, then the Government of the day cannot have any alibi for preventing the special advisers being brought into the open and being subject to scrutiny. [More…]

• But those of us who are keen on democracy should realise that Parliament is the focal point of democracy. [More…]

• Let me deal with the talk about the little people and democracy and the cheap gibes that are made at Bob Hawke and other ACTU officers. [More…]

• We can see that this is a demonstration of democracy. [More…]

• This may be the sort of democracy honourable senators opposite believe in, but it is not my idea of democracy, and I would hate to be associated with them in any forum in which the public tests their ability to be democratic. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite talk about parliamentary democracy but will not apply it. [More…]

• At the first test of parliamentary democracy they want to gag a Minister. [More…]

• We are providing, for example, that there shall be more democracy in the union movement. [More…]

• It is an honour for me to be asked to address representatives of the world’s greatest and most free Press in the capital of the world’s greatest and most free democracy. [More…]

• In this country, as in any democracy which places reliance upon the enforcement of law and protection of the people, officers of the law who protect the rights of the individual can be placed in dangerous situations at times. [More…]

• A new government which was entirely foreign to any form of democracy was imposed upon them, and since then Czechoslovakia has been a complete communist dictatorship. [More…]

• If anybody were to say to me that it would have been possible to do so with democracy, pure and undefiled, I would say to them that their attitude was most unfair. [More…]

• If we are to have some concept of the will of the people in a democracy which is in some way expressed outside the law we will have incipient anarchy. [More…]

• I think that if they accept the principles of democracy they must accept that it is our turn to govern. [More…]

• Is not the test of democracy for a country to be able to tolerate divergent views in its society? [More…]

• That is democracy, it is healthy, because today with higher educational standards and schools of industrial management, it is a case of jack being as good as his master. [More…]

• Everyone would hope for the speedy restoration of democracy in Chile. [More…]

• You cannot tell me that that is democracy. [More…]

• Yet they talk about democracy. [More…]

• Do honourable senators opposite who are sitting there remember 1968 and the second rape of Czechoslovakia, once the great democracy of this earth. [More…]

• The sooner there is democracy in Rhodesia- that means rule by the vast majority of the black people- the better for everyone. [More…]

• He said that such things are done only in totalitarian societies but in a democracy, where people do pretty much as they please, such a thing is right out of court altogether. [More…]

• And this is the voice of democracy. [More…]

• If Senator Webster and Senator Wright had any principle and any regard for the Parliament or democracy they would withdraw their allegations. [More…]

• We have heard the word ‘democratic’ used in respect of one section of the Australian Labor Party, and the word ‘democracy’ has been thrown across the chamber in recent weeks. [More…]

• May I say that democracy is a two-way process, and if the Parliament is going to work, and especially if this Senate is going to work it requires some common sense and co-operation from the Opposition as well as from the Government? [More…]

• The matter which I believe should be in the forefront of our attention this evening is the extent to which the Standing Orders of the Senate as they are now in force are adequate to preserve the institution of parliamentary democracy in this country. [More…]

• That frivolous interjection simply reveals the indifference of the Labor Party to the question of democracy and freedom of speech not only in this country but in this Parliament. [More…]

• I rise tonight to appeal to the Senate, to the Standing Orders Committee and to you Mr President, to call a most urgent meeting of the Standing Orders Committee to ensure that this vital principle of democracy and of parliamentary government in this country is inviolate. [More…]

• We hear honourable senators opposite squawking and squealing about democracy. [More…]

• It makes me sick in the stomach to see a person like this talking about democracy. [More…]

• I hope they will learn their lesson about democracy and will ensure that real democratic processes are observed in this House. [More…]

• Western rapprochement with the Soviet Union could be dangerous if the West acquiesced over the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, he said. [More…]

• The situation in a democracy today is such that people are becoming more and more aware that the citizen has a right of access to knowledge and information, and this right of access to knowledge and information is one which, if I may say so, should not be affected by political situations or political differences, or indeed compromised by political pressures. [More…]

• It is interesting to see that honourable senators opposite have realised the great democracy that obtains in the Australian Labor Party, that a wide diversity of opinion is tolerated, that we are able to live happily together although differing on some points, and that we certainly are able to emphasise points differently. [More…]

• It should be reported through the media to the people of Australia so that there can be dialogue and participatory democracy involving this Parliament and the people of Australia. [More…]

• I suggest that we should have a reconsideration of the values of those Senate committees and decide whether they are doing a service to the system of democracy or whether they are only time consuming. [More…]

• We appreciate that the Minister for Labour (Mr Clyde Cameron) has made a great claim, and he has sought to give expression to this claim in various ways in this Bill, that unions should provide for a form of participatory democracy. [More…]

• But I suggest that he has missed the point when he says, as he did in answer to my proposition, that there was some sort of contradiction in his attitude towards union democracy on the question of amalgamations and union democracy on the question that we are considering. [More…]

• I suggest that Senator Greenwood is caught in a fundamental contradiction here; and if he insists that there should be this ultimate democracy in the matter of amalgamation, I think he is caught with the proposition that the members should also be consulted about what to them is a much more important thing: That is, an agreement about their wages and conditions. [More…]

• A takeover or Indonesia or South East Asia by Communist regimes would pose a grave threat to Australian democracy. [More…]

• I cannot understand why we have to impose our system of democracy on Papua New Guinea. [More…]

• I do not know that our system of democracy is that good. [More…]

• That, I suggest, would be the direct antithesis of Australian democracy and clearly would be outside the general public interest. [More…]

• The next logical step is to ask what has happened so far as trade union democracy is concerned. [More…]

• I make this appeal to Senator Hannan in regard to his fears about the merger of the metal trade unions killing trade union democracy. [More…]

• Was there ever a bigger scandal in regard to democracy than to allege that the amalgamation was democratic when only about 1 7 per cent of the members voted? [More…]

• Do Government Senators call that democracy? [More…]

• The only other point that needs to be made relates to the history of the big amalgamated unions in other countries.. Go to Great Britain and ask about the Transport and General Workers Union and about democracy in the Amalgamated Engineering Union. [More…]

• The point I want to make is that once there is a huge amalgamated organ- .isation democracy flies out the door because it is too big for people to get to the rank and file. [More…]

• In my view that is democracy. [More…]

• The highest aspirations which the Prime Minister expressed were not with the principles of democracy, not with the principles of a country espousing the British law, the rule of law, not finding it there at all, but its highest aspirations were symbolised with China. [More…]

• -I am hoping that Indonesia, which has been mentioned, will move more and more towards democracy. [More…]

• I have endeavoured to deal with all of them because I concede the right of the people in the democracy to put their views and, as far as possible, to receive an answer. [More…]

• I believe that in a democracy interests which put in a great deal of voluntary and other work for education should have the right to present their own nominees. [More…]

• Surely, in the case of elections of national governments as well as of State governments, this medium ought to be available to those who want to communicate their political ideas to the people and to those who want to receive those political ideas, and this ought not to be on terms of some prohibitive price being imposed so that political parties and electors have a price tag put on democracy. [More…]

• If they believe in democracy surely they will give an area with u population of 120,000 people representation in this honourable Senate. [More…]

• As far as I am concerned I think it is the essence of democracy that senators from the Northern Territory, whether they come from Alice Springs or Darwin and whether or not I agree with their point of view, should sit in this place. [More…]

• Obviously, if we believe in broadening democracy there is only one answer, and that is to support this legislation. [More…]

• I believe that the more senators we have here from the distant parts of Australia the nearer we will get to the real essence of democracy. [More…]

• There is no way that we can fertilise democracy other than by assuring that representative Calder has a couple of senators to assist him in his electorate. [More…]

• We talk a lot of rubbish about limited democracy and Opposition senators sermonise about little unions having rights along with big unions. [More…]

• On the contrary, we be believe it to be of the essence of our democracy. [More…]

• If in the normal development of the processes of constitutional democracy and the processes of parliamentary democracy the wishes of one chamber are not acceded to by the other chamber then the other chamber has its options as to what it does. [More…]

• I find it a complete negation of everything that we stand for in a democracy to suggest that people cannot be put into a job to do something for the community at large when they have special knowledge and a lifetime of training and experience. [More…]

• This is the very essence of democracy that these groups work in this way. [More…]

• It is abundantly clear from questions which we have asked in this place and the answers which we have been given that the enormous police raids of early April were a farce, a disaster and a negation of democracy in this country. [More…]

• Although democracy is not the perfect way of running a country, it is the safest way. [More…]

• That is an extension of democracy. [More…]

• I do not think anyone who believes in parliamentary democracy would disagree with him in that regard. [More…]

• We say that that is not a proper course of action and that it would be far more consistent with democracy to let the matter pass. [More…]

• The Leader of the Government has put up the proposition that because one House passes a Bill for an Act to hold a referendum we in this place ought not oppose it but we ought, in the interest of democracy, to allow the people to exercise their judgment on it. [More…]

• It is a right which is sacred in a democracy. [More…]

• Many reasons have been given for abandoning democracy. [More…]

• Sometimes dictators have said that democracy is undesirable for the people and that the dictators know best. [More…]

• It would be a falsification of democracy if, on any matter of government policy approved by the House of Representatives, possibly by a large majority- [More…]

• This would be absurd, as a denial of popular democracy. [More…]

• As far as fund democracy is concerned, I have waited in vain for some injection of democracy in relation to funds consulting their members. [More…]

• I make this point in relation to fund democracy, and Senator Douglas McClelland in his own effective way will deal with much of the structure of this Bill. [More…]

• I did not think I would live to see the day when among the elected representatives of the people, one of those charged with implementing democracy in this country, let alone a man in the highest office of the land, the Senate of this Parliament- [More…]

• In a democracy there is no room for that principle. [More…]

• The Government has introduced legislation to limit overseas control of companies and to promote democracy in unions. [More…]

• His action was very serious so far as the democracy of this country is concerned. [More…]

• After promising the Deputy Prime Minister, as he did, that he would amend the advertisement to show the correct picture, that was Mr BjelkePetersen ‘s idea of fairness and that was his idea of democracy. [More…]

• The Treasurer is a very humane and honest man and we do not question for one moment that in a democracy there has to be a certain degree of trial and error. [More…]

• Senator Gietzelt has argued in the past for rank and file democracy in the unions. [More…]

• We want rank and file democracy in funds. [More…]

• We are talking about democracy and federalism. [More…]

• But there is a time and a place for parliamentary democracy to work. [More…]

• That is a reasonable and sensible procedure and the Government ought to have enough wisdom to accept it in the interests of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I would suggest that it is not a very good day for democracy when the Opposition parties, after having so decisively rejected this measure, which was simply a measure to put the proposition to the people, now, again, in March- when the Government is proceeding as expeditiously as it can to fulfil the constitutional requirements- are pretending that they need time to make up their minds or to debate the issue. [More…]

• All these slurs about the Senate and its members, and the claim that democracy will be denied are a red herring drawn across the trail that is being laid by this legislation. [More…]

• Is it the Opposition’s idea of democracy to endeavour to delay the Government’s program? [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• If I may be allowed to continue, Senator McManus having had his say, I suggest that all the crocodile tears that we have had from Senator Greenwood and all the appeals for democracy that we have had from Senator McManus are so much hypocrisy. [More…]

• In any event, I suggest that despite all the indignation that we have heard from senators opposite, theirs is an insincere and phoney argument based on a desire to avoid the judgment of the Australian people and not on any devotion to democracy. [More…]

• He spoke a lot about democracy. [More…]

• I put this simple propositon to Senator Wriedt who is the senior Minister in the Senate chamber at the moment: If the argument is that merely because a Bill passes through the House of Representatives twice with a constitutional majority it has to go to the people because that is democracy, will he - [More…]

• If the Government proposition is that merely because a Bill to alter the Constitution passes through the House of Representatives twice by a constitutional majority it can- it does not have to betherefore be submitted by the Governor-General to the electorate, and that that is democracy, will the Government give an unqualified undertaking that should the Senate twice, by an absolute majority, pass a Bill to alter the Constitution, even though that Bill should be rejected, laid aside or amended unacceptably in another place, the Prime Minister will advise the GovernorGeneral also to submit the proposition contained in that Bill to the people? [More…]

• If we can get that sort of unqualified assurance from the Government then there may be some substance in the argument of honourable senators opposite when they prate about democracy. [More…]

• But without this sort of unqualified undertaking, for Government members to talk about democracy and to talk about courage is nothing more than a cheap debating point. [More…]

• Unless we can get this unqualified undertaking from the Government that it will submit to the people referendum proposals passed twice by this chamber and rejected twice by the House of Representatives, let us have no more talk about democracy in submitting matters to the people. [More…]

• The Labor Party’s paid, glib writers who had been students of the Kennedy regime in America of the 1960s had seen a Western democracy hungry for values beyond the material values, hungry for what is called the quality of life- the environment, conservation, the general human values - [More…]

• I believe that the monarchy is one of the most enduring and substantial things where democracy is practised in the British Commonwealth. [More…]

• I say that under its jurisdiction democracy has operated better than it has done anywhere else in the world. [More…]

• I ask: Is that parliamentary democracy? [More…]

• Politicians, irrespective of the Party to which they belong, have a responsibility in a democracy, unless they reside in one of those privileged nations which has either a fascist or a communist dictatorship. [More…]

• Is that the Government’s idea of democracy? [More…]

• It wishes to fiddle with the Constitution which took years of consideration by the fathers of Federation to compile and which gives us the whole basis on which the democracy of this country has functioned. [More…]

• Does Senator McAuliffe consider that to be democracy? [More…]

• I am suggesting that the Government should have at least provided qualified opinions as to whether what the Prime Minister has put is correct before it came forward with all this malarkey about democracy. [More…]

• Does the Government call that democracy? [More…]

• Yet, that speech, and that is the Labor Party case to the people to which I referred, gave no hint of Labor’s plans to launch, with unprecedented intensity, an attack on the very cornerstone of democracy, namely, the Austraiian Constitution. [More…]

• When we speak of houses of parliament we are inclined to eulogise all the abstract virtues of democracy. [More…]

• So this is a great danger to parliamentary democracy in this country. [More…]

• To say that these opportunities should not be made available to the people is to deny democracy. [More…]

• The simple fact is that this House of the Parliament, and this democracy, exist in the belief that sovereignty lies in the people, and that power lies in the people. [More…]

• The Labor Patry’s claims that we should not annoy the people with elections is fundamentally to denigrate the system of democracy. [More…]

• It is really to argue for the destruction of democracy. [More…]

• If you do not have elections, you do not have democracy. [More…]

• The essence of democracy is that the power which resides at present in the 2 Houses of this Parliament should be reviewed as frequently as possible and as desirable so that the people in Australia can sit in judgment. [More…]

• I believe that in a world in which democracy is shrinking; in a world in which violence and anarchy are growing; in a world in which freedoms are under threat, we should do everything we can to preserve the decentralisation and diffusion of power. [More…]

• In our democracy the Senate should not be in the position of being a rubber stamp for the House of Representatives. [More…]

• If the Government sees the Senate as a frustration, an annoyance, an inconvenience- as undoubtedly our authoritarian Prime Minister of today does regard the Senate- then this is part of democracy, and I believe democracy is worth it. [More…]

• I say that it is fortunate for the workings of democracy that now they are able to be elected at a different time, because the role of the Senate which I have just mentioned as an independent body reviewing legislation is aided by that fact- and notwithstanding that it is seen by some as an annoyance and an inconvenience, the way the Senate is functioning is part of democracy and it aids the democratic processes. [More…]

• All of this, I believe, stems from the fact that the Senate in the role that it has performed has served democracy and has not frustrated it. [More…]

• It will continue to serve democracy so long as it is not tied to the elections for the House of Representatives in a way that cannot possibly be broken. [More…]

• Yet they talk about us as if somehow or other we are running the Senate, whereas every educated child in the community knows that there is a temporary defect in democracy in the community in that the Government, elected by the people, is being frustrated in its will by those senators opposite who are yelping out and not letting me speak freely. [More…]

• We challenge this attitude of the Opposition, and we say that Opposition members know very well that if democracy prevails in this country so many of the old, worn out shibboleths, the old bone rattlers of the last century, the old horse and buggy mentality which has been astride this country for so long will be gone, that their days of philandering will be over and that there will be new era in Australia in which we are prepared to go straightforwardly to the people and say: ‘In a democracy the majority of the people’s will will prevail’. [More…]

• It is reflecting democracy. [More…]

• Nevertheless, I suppose that it is probably reasonable in a democracy that even the Government is entitled to be heard. [More…]

• What has happened here is one of the greatest negations of democracy in that those opposite with their temporary majority are daring to arrogate to themselves the right to prevent the Australian Government from going to its own people and asking them whether they will say yes or no to an amendment of the Australian Constitution. [More…]

• It is the ultimate in the negation of democracy. [More…]

• Last Sunday the Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) made a television appearance and intoned further platitudes to the effect that he and his Caucus were going to make Australia a veritable Utopia, a model of democracy in the eyes of our neighbours and the world’. [More…]

• It is far from reality to call the Bill ‘s proposals ‘democratic’ Indeed, the Bill is the antithesis of democracy. [More…]

• It shows also the absolute inconsistency of the Government because it is so apparent that what was being urged by this Government as the hallmark of democracy in 1973 can be discarded and regarded as being of no account in 1974 when we have a Bill which preaches precisely the opposite. [More…]

• Surely that is what democracy is all about, because that is the power which a Parliament should have. [More…]

• But it certainly has proved to be far closer to democracy than first past the post voting, which was the love child, if I may call it that, of the Labor Party for a considerable period of time. [More…]

• It is not democracy because it is one of the major parties in an electoral system. [More…]

• It is not democracy that one party should have that right. [More…]

• Would the Labour Party of that day have suggested that only the majority parties of previous days had a right to live politically in a democracy? [More…]

• By comparison with the system that operates in New Zealand and the system that operates in the United Kingdom, the Australian democratic system as it is applied to this Federal Parliament is as near perfection as democracy can attain. [More…]

• These are all matters which are now well accepted features of our Australian democracy. [More…]

• There is no substance in the view that the Labor Government, or the Prime Minister, is seeking to curtail democracy. [More…]

• The attitude of members of the Opposition to the other 4 questions is that they do not intend to provide for democratic elections; they do not intend to give the people of the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory any rights to vote in a referendum; they do not intend to allow local government authorities to come before the Loan Council; and they do not intend to allow any of the things that we believe will bring greater democracy to this country. [More…]

• I believe that this has destroyed in this country the concept of what I call a property owning democracy which so many of us have stood for all our lives. [More…]

• That the undersigned men and women of Australia believe in a Christian way of life; and that no democracy can thrive unless its citizens are responsible and law abiding. [More…]

• Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that the members in Parliament assembled will see that the powerful communicator, television, is used to build into the nation those qualities of character which make a democracy workintegrity, teamwork and a sense of purpose by serving- and that television is used to bring faith in God to the heart of the family and national life. [More…]

• That is a great measure of the democracy of the Press in Western Australia. [More…]

• Had he been there, I hope he would have received a little more justice and democracy than he received at Forrest Place. [More…]

• I hope that everybody who supports the Labor Party and everybody who supports democracy will have a look at Federation Insurance Ltd and see that it is the type of organisation which, no doubt while it pays money to people who prate about democracy and freedom of speech, is prepared to deny a man and his family their livelihood because the man belongs to a legal political organisation and wishes to exercise his democratic rights as a candidate for Parliament. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information, and whereas our existing Australian flag and our national anthem, ‘God Save The Queen’ are perpetual reminders of these hard-won freedoms and of the wise British principle of the division of power, so well reflected in our own Australian Constitution with its careful separation of powers as between the Crown and Commonwealth Parliament, the Senate, the State parliaments, the Government-General and State Governors, and the independent courts of justice, and whereas all such rights, liberties, heritage, advancement and prosperity, etc., are of no avail if our armed forces are unprepared or incapable of repelling invasion of our shores or withstanding other military threats, so therefore must all these things be accorded the highest national concern and priority. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information, [More…]

• We have on the other side a body of people, who parade the virtues of democracy and who have pledged themselves to uphold law and order, denying the highest authority in Australia the opportunity to determine an issue that is of importance to all Australians. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite talk of democracy but when it comes to the crunch as to whether democracy is being observed we must have a look at some of the activities of these people who claim to be so righteous in their attitude towards democracy. [More…]

• On that occasion a Senate vacancy was caused by the death of a senator from Queensland, and this man who now professes to have all the rights to democracy made a complete and utter joke of the process by which a successor was appointed. [More…]

• We do not dismiss the Government in this chamber; we merely say: Go back to your masters, the people, and let them decide whether your actions of the last week will preserve democracy and good government in this country, or whether they will destroy the prestige of this House and the other place for all time.’ [More…]

• We prate about democracy. [More…]

• I repeat that some of the small health funds could not be faulted on their democracy. [More…]

• In fact, if I ever meet Mr Cade outside the Parliament I will ram this report down his throat, because he is one on the people who has denied democracy to the people of Australia. [More…]

• I think that they would be serving democracy and the little people in the community if they offered constructive proposals and did not become the lackeys of the vested interests that are the free riders under the present system. [More…]

• The founders of our Constitution realised that that principle did not apply in the case of the Senate, which is just as much a House of democracy as is the House of Representatives. [More…]

• So we have a complete system of corruption designed to get control of the Senate as it now is and, in the offing, we have proposals to alter the electoral system to ensure that if the Labor Party cannot get its way by bribery, it will get its way by altering the electoral system in a way which is a gerrymander and an insult to democracy. [More…]

• That surely is what representative democracy is essentially concerned with. [More…]

• If our democracy is to be meaningful let us use as many opportunities as will present themselves to let the people have their say. [More…]

• Surely we have not reached the stage in a democracy where the Government announces: ‘There is going to be an election, but we are not going to tell the Opposition because we want to book all the halls and make all the arrangements first. [More…]

• He said that it would be a falsification of democracy on a matter of Government policy approved by the House of Representatives, possibly by a large majority, if the Senate, representing the States and not the people, could reverse the decision on a Bill passed in the House of Representatives. [More…]

• I think it is a good thing for democracy that we all go back to the people. [More…]

• 1 ) That the Senate believes that the system of imposed regionalism being effected by the Minister for Urban and Regional Development under the Grants Commission Act 1973 will promote centralised direction and control of regional activities and destroy the ability of local government to respond to the needs and aspirations of its citizens, and further urges State governments and local authorities to be active in promoting and maintaining basic democracy by safeguarding the rights of local government bodies so that they are responsible to those who elect them for the policies they pursue, and (2) that the President of the Senate is directed to convey the text of this resolution- [More…]

• We are a democratic socialist party in the tradition of democratic socialism or social democracy which is present in government in many parts of the world. [More…]

• Australian democracy, which I believe is the Australian way, has reached great stature because of individualism. [More…]

• We must retain freedom of choice within the common law if we are to survive as a free democracy in the tradition of the Australian people. [More…]

• There seems to be no reason at all to get away from the basic principle in our democracy of the community’s involvement in government, the power and involvement of the people on the spot, so that their knowledge and priorities may have proper significance. [More…]

• Local government with the power and involvement of people on the spot is as basic to Australian democracy as is the strength, sovereignty and involvement of the people through their State parliaments. [More…]

• These political personages who are so superficial as to suggest impropriety in the Senate action in putting up the processes for a double dissolution and committing both Houses to a decision by the people are completely betraying the fundamental rights of the people to democracy. [More…]

• Therefore, it would be within the spirit of democracy that in that situation the Government in another place should recognise that we in this chamber have inescapable and inalienable duties to study the legislation on its merits. [More…]

• Rapid acceleration of income was likely to destroy democracy rather than reshape it through redistribution of wealth, . [More…]

• Democracy will not survive, here or elsewhere, unless its people can develop the self-restraint necessary to control inflation. [More…]

• I think democracy in Australia is at stake. [More…]

• -Senator Mulvihill does not believe in the voice of democracy when it speaks against him. [More…]

• If the electoral laws do not result in the Government desired by the majority- if they are manipulated to reflect the political interest of persons or partiesit would bc a denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• The Government, mindful of its mandate and responsibility, is determined to ensure that the Australian electoral laws embrace those fundamental principles of human rights and democracy in this nation. [More…]

• This is fundamental to the concept of democracy. [More…]

• That, I believe, is a development in this country which was not seen in the years of the Liberal-Country Party Government and which, if it develops at the rate at which it is currently progressing, will destroy the integrity of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If we are to maintain our democracy and maintain the spirit of freedom and inquiry which ought to be part of it these things have to be said. [More…]

• The people of Australia did not give a mandate to this Government to change the whole nature of the Australian democracy. [More…]

• Somebody mentioned constitutional democracy. [More…]

• So do not start talking to me about constitutional democracy, Senator Greenwood, because quite seriously you are politically fraudulent. [More…]

• Getting back to what we were talking about before Senator Greenwood was foolish enough to talk about constitutional democracy - [More…]

• Yet you have the temerity to stand up and talk about constitutional democracy. [More…]

• Perhaps it is good for democracy if 1,000 people leave a metropolitan Sydney metropolitan electorate and another 1,000 people take their place. [More…]

• Despite the Government’s honeyed and pious words in the second reading speech which tried to indicate that it has some dedication to parliamentary democracy, this Bill is not intended to produce a just and equitable electoral system. [More…]

• The United Kingdom is held up as the greatest example of parliamentary democracy in the world. [More…]

• The Government proposes this Bill because we feel it is a step forward in the long and difficult journey of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The essence of democracy, as I have always known it, is that the will of the people must prevail, that government must rest on the consent of the governed and that no voter must be favoured or discriminated against in the exercise of his vote. [More…]

• I believe that democracy must rest on the principle of majority rule. [More…]

• So that is the pattern of democracy set by the Mother of Parliaments, which retains the principle of one vote, one value. [More…]

• If the electoral laws do not result in the Government desired by the majority- if they are manipulated to reflect the political interest of persons or partiesit would be a denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• If we gave 2 senators to the Northern Territory we would be making democracy a more living thing in the Territory, and that is all we are after. [More…]

• I do not think it is in the best interests of democracy for the Opposition to employ this kind of tactic again. [More…]

• Whether the course it adopts is politically right, whether it is in the interests of democracy or an affront to democracy is another question. [More…]

• So much has been said on the pieces of legislation on the 3 occasions they have been before the Parliament that there is no point in going over the basic democracy which is involved. [More…]

• There will be an obliteration, such as we saw at the last election, of many more honourable senators opposite if they insist in attempting to deny democracy. [More…]

• Let us remember the only point that I really rose to make: It does not strike me as being a great defence of democracy to suggest that one representative is enough for 30,000 voters in a territory and that 15 representatives are appropriate for the State from which one happens to come. [More…]

• In general terms, we would have to say that the diffusion of power through democracy is effective only when the voters take an interest in what policies are presented to them. [More…]

• One million people not covered by health insurance is a lot of people in a country with the pretensions which we have of being a modern and an efficient democracy. [More…]

• I understand that there are not too many Australian Medical Association meetings at which there is a quorum and there are not too many doctors- it is a bad thing for our democracy- who take too much interest in the affairs of the AMA or the General Practitioners Society. [More…]

• So much for democracy within the Liberal Party and for the policies which were produced in those dramatic days over Easter of 1 974; the policies which suddenly emerged but which still do not seem to receive universal acceptance among Liberal Party supporters themselves. [More…]

• The Government ought to recognise that the rights which the Constitution confers are rights which all parties, whether they are in government or in opposition, ought to protect because they are in due course the only protections in our constitutional democracy which we can rely upon. [More…]

• They are safeguards which make democracy work. [More…]

• In a democracy this chamber must be supreme. [More…]

• Is this the way in which the Government expects democracy to be carried on? [More…]

• The power to take away a permit or licence from a person who is engaged in the actual work of exploring for minerals on the basis that the Minister, in his own discretion, unexaminable and unchallengeable by the courts, makes such a decision is in my opinion the antithesis of all that democracy and responsible government recognise. [More…]

• I was interested to hear Senator Steele Hall’s remarks over the last few days about a commonsense approach to many problems and about the traditions of parliamentary practice and parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• There is in the Australian community a cynicism and, indeed, a great measure of concern over most of the basic things that concern us as Australians operating what is, and hopefully what shall remain, a free enterprise democracy. [More…]

• Today they did not get the respect to which they are entitled, and I was ashamed to hear from those who profess to believe in democracy words such as those which emanated from Senator Wright today. [More…]

• It has been rightly described by Sir Robert Menzies as a falsification of popular democracy. [More…]

• It would be a falsification of democracy if on any matter of Government policy approved by the House of Representatives, possibly by a large majority, the Senate representing the States and not the people could reverse the decision. [More…]

• It is fitting that the first Bill to come before this first Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament should be designed to strengthen the equality of popular democracy in Australia. [More…]

• To resist that simple, clear and basic principle of democracy we have had this long campaign of obstruction. [More…]

• It is a denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• Such a possible disparity in the value of votes is inconsistent with the full realisation of democracy. [More…]

• For its content and its implications, for its real value and its symbolic importance, for its contribution to the cause of democracy in a world where democracy seems daily more frail, I commend this Bill to honourable senators and members. [More…]

• We are resolved not to let legislation go through the House of Representatives and the Senate which we believe is bad in principle and which would detract from the constitutional principles of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• That system has survived and it has never in any way dinted democracy. [More…]

• In fact, it has contributed to democracy. [More…]

• If we are looking for true democracy why have we allowed this to happen? [More…]

• Our system in this country has stood the test of time; our democracy has worked well. [More…]

• Let us have a quick look at what happens in some of the other countries with no less an attachment to democracy and equality of representation than we have. [More…]

• The people of Australia did not give a mandate to this Government to change the whole nature of the Australian democracy. [More…]

• There is no other way to look at Australian democracy. [More…]

• If the electoral processes are manipulated to serve the political interests of persons or parties it would be a denial of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• Today the Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) gave us one of his lectures about how democracy is so frail in Australia at the moment. [More…]

• I did not hear him say anything about what Mr Mundey said yesterday when he was attacking democracy. [More…]

• How does Mr Whitlam talk about democracy being frail in Australia? [More…]

• He says democracy is frail in Australia because one chamber of this Parliament is prepared to exercise its rights which it was guaranteed under the Constitution. [More…]

• He and his Party are the people who are putting democracy under attack m this country, not the Senate. [More…]

• He stood here and lectured us about the frailty of democracy when he and his Party and his supporters outside are doing more to pull it down than anybody else in the community. [More…]

• When the Prime Minister stood up here and lectured us, as he so often does, about democracy and about what that great Chief Justice Earl Warren said in the Supreme Court of the United States of America, he certainly did not advert to the Supreme Court case of February 1973 involving the State of Virginia. [More…]

• If the electoral laws do not result in the Government desired by the majority- if they are manipulated to reflect the political interest of persons or partiesit would be a denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• The Government, mindful of its mandate and responsibility, is determined to ensure that the Australian electoral laws embrace those fundamental principles of human rights and democracy in this nation. [More…]

• Only those who believe in a selective form of democracy will oppose the principle of equality of voting and the elections of governments by the majority. [More…]

• The members of the Country Party depend on this form of democracy for their survival, individually and as a Party. [More…]

• The last vestige of democracy has gone under the administration of the Country Party Government in Queensland. [More…]

• In defence of his Party’s vested interests in this Parliament and throughout the country he has deliberately sought to abandon a vital aspect of Australian democracy upheld by successive Labor Prime MinistersWatson, Fisher, Scullin, Curtin and Chifley. [More…]

• Any Prime Minister who is prepared to come into this chamber, on an occasion such as this, and, mouth the fundamentals of democracy but who clearly is unable to provide leadership for the Australian democracy at the present time is not capable of maintaining the confidence of the Australian people. [More…]

• This is supposed to be democracy. [More…]

• Is this democracy? [More…]

• That is not democracy either. [More…]

• But the right honourable gentleman’s Party supported the situation which allowed 20 per cent but it did not provide for that variation because it sold out to the Country Party any principles it had in regard to electoral distribution, lt is a great surprise to me that the Liberal Party which, at the turn of the electoral wheel, might one day- a long way off I feelbecome the government of this country in its own right, will never, as it sells out to the Country Party and allows that weighing of electorates, achieve what should be the objective in a 2-Party system which relies on traditional Westminster style democracy of governing in its own right. [More…]

• That every citizen should have an equal voice in the Parliament is the very basis and foundation of democracy. [More…]

• If that situation does not endure democracy does not endure. [More…]

• Today, at this Joint Sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, this historic occasion, democracy in Australia is on trial. [More…]

• Let those who stand for democracy speak today in this Parliament. [More…]

• The real problem of democracy in this country is the sham of the Opposition. [More…]

• It does not do much good for democracy to have people sitting here for 20 years because they effectively and safely represent very small areas. [More…]

• It would be much better from the point of view of democracy if seats were made more marginal. [More…]

• He referred to the Senate white-anting democracy, but I simply remind him and others that the Senate has just been re-elected. [More…]

• .All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrine is completely contrary to every conception of surviving western democracy. [More…]

• From listening to the supporters of the present Government speaking on this Bill today one would gain the impression that they believe that they have a monopoly or concern for democracy. [More…]

• I can assure all honourable senators and members that this is not so, and that the LiberalCountry Party coalition Opposition feels just as strongly about what must be preserved in the interests of democracy as does any other member of this Parliament. [More…]

• The preservation of our democracy is possibly the greatest responsibility which lies in the hands of the members of the Parliament. [More…]

• Democracy will never be perfect. [More…]

• I believe that the Chief Electoral Officer and the Electoral Officers in each State have shown, by the results in the past 2 lh decades, that they have been men who have taken notice of the need to preserve our democracy. [More…]

• If we send our democracy down the drain we are losing everything in this country. [More…]

• In essence, that preserves the democracy which allows the honourable member for Grayndler, with all his weaknesses, to come into this place and to promote and propose legislation which is to the detriment of the people. [More…]

• In conclusion I sincerely hope that, when this legislation has passed this Parliament and finally goes to the Electoral Commissioners to be implemented in the redistribution of the electoral boundaries of this nation, they recognise the tremendous need to preserve the democracy which we have followed for three-quarters of a century under both nonLabor and Labor governments. [More…]

• It is a rninimum requirement of democracy that they should be so represented. [More…]

• Yet you describe us and particularly my Senate colleagues as being the white anters of democracy, an expression used last week by the Prime Minister. [More…]

• You claim to be the champions of parliamentary democracy and yet in Government you have used the gag and the guillotine in that short period of time more frequently than any other party. [More…]

• To use your own terminology, you are not merely the white anters of the Parliament or of democracy. [More…]

• For this reason, and in order that democracy may have a chance to survive in this country, I firmly believe in the abolition of the Senate. [More…]

• The reason has nothing to do with democracy or democratic principles, because if ever there was a bunch of politicians in this country lacking in principle it is those on the other side of the chamber. [More…]

• Is that parliamentary democracy or is it socialism? [More…]

• Its actions strike at the fundamental concepts of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The measure of the government in a democracy surely must be its capacity and performance in preventing exploitation, whether it be exploitation of individuals, groups of individuals, of resources or indeed of freedom itself. [More…]

• These 6 Bills found their way to this Joint Sitting and they are opposed even in this last hour by the Liberal and Country Parties, not out of wanton obstructionism but because this side of the chamber, representative of opinion held over a wide spectrum of the Australian people, believes that they are bad in principle and are likely to detract from the effectiveness of our parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If the Opposition wants to argue about this particular Bill, that is a good thing; that is the way democracy ought to work. [More…]

• I think that at least half the population and many observers of the Senate would think that the actions of the Senate have not been in accordance with the best principles of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The disturbance that is being brought upon the community by an unparalleled spate of strikes and disruption by the trade unions has to be considered by any parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• On that will depend whether this democracy survives or whether it is reduced to a disgracefully low and unlawful level. [More…]

• I do not think that viewpoint would assist in the better maintenance of our system of parliamentary democracy and supervision over those who are exercising quite important administrative powers. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information, [More…]

• If we are to maintain democracy in this country- we are often lectured in this place by members of the Government that democracy is a very frail thing in the world today- it is important that democracy works at the grass roots. [More…]

• Without strong effective local authorities in Australia we will get a centralised authority and democracy will start to wither on the vine. [More…]

• In order to protect democracy in Australia we have to make certain that local authorities elected by ratepayers have a sense of responsibility, a capacity to plan and a capacity to spend. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information, [More…]

• In many respects Norman Kirk can be regarded as a man who was a model social democrat, a man who stood for parliamentary democracy, for orderly processes of law at the same time coupled with the alleviation of the conditions of the people of his country and of other countries with which his country came into association, not by warlike, aggressive or belligerent actions but by cooperation and by entering into a peaceful social contract. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• The annexation and incorporation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union has not been recognized by any Western democracy, including Australia. [More…]

• I think that this is very important if a parliament in a modern day democracy is to work properly. [More…]

• I ask the AttorneyGeneral whether he has seen reports suggesting that Australia’s security organisations have been training agents from some Asian countries, particularly countries where democracy is very limited and where the armed forces exercise undue influence. [More…]

• This cannot in any way be considered a step forward in a democracy such as ours. [More…]

• In the election of a union executive surely this must be a realistic way of contributing to the democracy of the union system in Australia and to more successful relationships between employer and employee alike. [More…]

• One alleged abuse is being investigated at the moment and there are numerous allegations of misuse of funds, the lack of accountability of some trade unions and the lack of democracy in the operation of trade unions- not in all unions but in some. [More…]

• They are to be resolved by ensuring that the democracy of the union is a real democracy and that the leadership represents the membership. [More…]

• In fact the speech delivered last night by the Leader of the Opposition in the other place could have been delivered by the Leader of the Opposition in any Western democracy which is subject to the same sort of problems as this country’s. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite who cannot see the dangers inherent in centralised government in a country as large as Australia might usefully study the conclusions of their British counterparts which were published last week in a White Paper entitled ‘Democracy and Devolution Proposals for Scotland and Wales’. [More…]

• I think democracy in Australia is at stake. [More…]

• The Australian Government welcomes this further evidence of progress towards the restoration of full parliamentary democracy in Greece. [More…]

• While there is a lot of talk in the community these days about the problems of man in society trying to live with either the corporations of capital or the corporations of labour, there also is the enormous problems looming of how man in a modern democracy is to survive against the statutory corporation. [More…]

• It certainly does not recognise the definition of democracy by the Westminster or British standard of government when selecting its friends around the world. [More…]

• In a political democracy that so-called solution is not viable. [More…]

• Given the constraints of a political democracy, inflation, according to Galbraith ‘s diagnosis, is unlikely to disappear until an intellectual revolution has developed into a common consensus, until a new conventional wisdom more attuned to the realities it seeks to interpret has replaced the old. [More…]

• I think that with the sort of people I have mentioned, including the former Senator Fitzgerald, in a democracy like Australia you can achieve a certain aim with parliamentary agitation. [More…]

• This is a democracy and the people of the Northern Territory are entitled to have their wish. [More…]

• I can imagine hardly any step which could be more dangerous in a democracy than the subsidising of printing or publication of material on a condition that it had the approval of the Government as to its contents. [More…]

• I can imagine hardly any step which could be more dangerous in a democracy than the subsidising of printing or publication of material on a condition that it had the approval of the Government as to its contents. [More…]

• But it is part of democracy. [More…]

• Having mentioned the subject of hubris, I think that the same spirit is disclosed in those who want us to have a temple of democracy in the clouds somewhere on Capital Hill where the masses will gaze up to their masters, bow down to them, worship them and perpetuate the old notion of British democracy at its height, of God bless the Queen and all her relations and keep us all in our proper stations. [More…]

• This is a democracy. [More…]

• A classic example is the way in which throughout the world over many years communists have used freedom of speech, freedom of association and all the democratic traditions under which they can work to undermine democracy and liberty and to establish their own dictatorship. [More…]

• The downfall of democracy - [More…]

• 1 believe that a study of democracy in those countries where it has disappeared will reveal that the sort of intimidation and tactics which have been engaged in by Government senators tonight have been reproduced in the actions of those who have contributed to the downfall of democracy in other countries. [More…]

• For Senator Greenwood to mouth words about democracy and at the same time deny the right of citizens, be they members of this Parliament or not, to issue a writ if they consider that they have been defamed is, I suggest, a complete inconsistency. [More…]

• We have another champion of democracy, do we, from Victoria? [More…]

• -Yes, I do believe in democratic socialism and social democracy. [More…]

• To me this is not democracy. [More…]

• If we unite and join in support for the Minister for Foreign Affairs we will be striking a blow for democracy throughout Australia and for the human civil rights of citizens. [More…]

• That is his view of democracy in the Senate. [More…]

• It does not do any good for democracy and the preservation of peace for this kind of idiotic suggestion to be put forward by the Returned Services League or anybody else. [More…]

• Disclosure of the studies into ways of circumventing Parliament casts a number of far-reaching doubts over principles whose acceptance has been at the heart of Australian parliamentary democracy based on the party system and the electoral mandate. [More…]

• The bypassing of Parliament undermines the whole concept of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is true that these are- procedures which in a parliamentary democracy should not be condoned. [More…]

• I merely say that there is a misunderstanding in a parliamentary democracy as to the role of government and the role of parliament. [More…]

• But once we concede democracy then socialist plans can be altered and we have the worst of all worlds. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech movement and the communication of knowledge and information, [More…]

• This was part of the introduction of democracy to people in an area who had not previously been active in public life. [More…]

• I have been in this place when the whole 25 or 26 members of the Labor Party have screeched in unison to try to drown me out and they can try it again if they want to but there is something more to freedom of speech and democracy than the Labor Party’s version of it. [More…]

• The information the Committee received has appeared on the dockyard notice board and I think that is democracy if a vigilance committee can get information of that sort. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was clearly developed as a Federation to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement and the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was developed on the Rights of Magna Carta to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free men and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement, the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• If democracy is to work in here there must be a certain amount of co-operation and there must be an observance of the will of the Senate. [More…]

• I would have thought that in a democracy the people who should tell the councils of Australia whether they are under-rating or over-rating are the ratepayers of Australia and nobody else. [More…]

• Victoria is facing a state of prospective conflict which ought to concern everyone who is interested in the preservation of democracy in this land. [More…]

• In a democracy the balancing of the various competing views which might be evident on any particular issue is charged to government. [More…]

• What is involved in what is now threatened in Victoria is something which we ought not to regard as outside that area, because the statements of some of the union leaders have been so threatening that one can only hope that when the Government is challenged the people will know what the issues are and will be overwhelmingly on the side of the people of this country and democracy. [More…]

• 1 believe every opportunity ought to be taken to emphasise that there is a threat to the position of Parliament, to the position of an elected Government and the whole institution of democracy in this country. [More…]

• My Party remains quite firmly and simply committed to the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the disciplines of parliamentary democracy in the union movement, as they should apply in this House. [More…]

• That whereas our constitutional parliamentary democracy was developed on the Rights ofthe Magna Carta to preserve for all time to the Australian people their cherished right to live as free nien and women, enjoying complete liberty of worship, assembly, speech, movement, the communication of knowledge and information. [More…]

• I think it is a very interesting observation on the working of our democracy that, on reflection, it is 3 years since that reference was first made. [More…]

• In my view the passage of this Bill by the Senate is as good an example of the workings of parliamentary democracy as I have witnessed in the time that I have been here. [More…]

• The second point is that I do not share the views expressed by Senator James McClelland and others that the passage of this Bill has demonstrated parliamentary democracy at its best. [More…]

• It should not regard this as a matter for a party but as a matter for democracy and for all members of the Parliament to seek to reach agreement. [More…]

• We then take the spectacle of democracy out of the hands of the individual and give this power to the type of organisations, of whatever sort- commercial or political- which have been known around the world at particular times to be less than savoury. [More…]

• Consequently I do not believe that this really contributes anything to an effective democracy. [More…]

• I do not propose to make any further comments other than to say that when the day arrives that people are not entitled to accept a suggestion made by whoever it is, so long as they exercise their own free will, and to send a telegram to a Minister, a Leader of the Opposition, or whoever else it may be, we have reached the stage where we no longer exist in a democracy. [More…]

• There can be no gain in that sort of circumstance in a democracy, in a free society. [More…]

• Had these electorates been distributed in a way which was compatible with democracy- honourable senators will recall the great declarations by the Supreme Court of the United States of America that an election by the people means that there must be equal electoratesthe coalition would have gained 52 seats and the Australian Labor Party 30 seats. [More…]

• That is not a comforting thought for the ALP, but I think it is an even more distressing thought for Australia and Queensland that we should have existing in Australia a State in which there is no democracy. [More…]

• If there was democracy there it is clear that the ALP would have lost- we face that- but it is not satisfactory that we allow to persist in our community an undemocratic system, a gerrymander of the worst type, which results in ALP members being put out in droves, in a manner quite unrepresentative of what occurred in the voting. [More…]

• I agree with the points that Senator Murphy has just made about the manner in which the electorates have been gerrymandered for the purpose of maintaining in power a man who does not understand the essence of democracy. [More…]

• It is a blot on democracy in this nation that we have people in this chamber who want to perpetuate this sort of system. [More…]

• We all know that in a democracy, with our checks and balances in the Federal system, that we all at times- trade unions and employers- try to get the best of both worlds. [More…]

• Every democracy faces a dilemma about the extent of controls. [More…]

• In a democracy, that right rests with the Australian people. [More…]

• It is surely not unreasonable to describe such an action as an outrage of democracy and a denial of the New South Wales voters’ democratic rights. [More…]

• Could any Australian doubt the obligation of these and all other senators to stand and be counted for the convention, for democracy itself? [More…]

• Well, that is a denigration of democracy. [More…]

• A former Liberal Prime Minister, Mr Gorton, has said that Mr Lewis is mad in his threatened attempt to usurp democracy. [More…]

• The whole principle of democracy and parliamentary representation is now under a threat. [More…]

• Senator McLaren may not think that is necessary but most Australians believe that respect for the law, its institutions and its personnel is basic to the survival of democracy and freedom in this country. [More…]

• The wicked socialists, taking a leaf out of the book of their opponents, the devoted protagonists of democracy who saved Australia from the wicked socialists by refusing Supply, say: ‘Well, that goes for us too. [More…]

• If that happened the democratically elected Liberal government would be thrown out by the sheer accident and unprincipled conduct of the Labor governments in South Australia and Tasmania and democracy would be denied. [More…]

• But now we have this second attack on the general conception of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• We are talking about what is about to happen in New South Wales where there will be an attack on the general concept of democracy as held by most of Australia. [More…]

• I remember clearly over a number of years appeasing those who would circumvent democracy. [More…]

• Well, that is a denigration of democracy. [More…]

• I remind the House that the Leader of the Opposition said that to vote for a party ticket in a Senate election is a denigration of democracy. [More…]

• The second requirement of law and order in a democracy is that the people should be assured that when they vote at an election their vote has some meaning. [More…]

• So already democracy itself is distorted by the composition of the Parliament. [More…]

• The whole point of democracy is that people who have strongly opposing views compete within the electorate and compete within Parliament. [More…]

• If someone is going to depart from that practice because he objects, however strongly, to the party to which he is opposed, then he is setting out to destroy democracy in the same way as democracy was destroyed in Germany in 1 933, in Austria in 1 934, in Italy in 1 92 1 and in Greece in the 1 960s. [More…]

• Democracy is a very fragile flower. [More…]

• Apart from a handful of countries in Asia and the Caribbean democracy exists only in countries where there is a relatively high standard of living and where there is a relatively high standard of education, and it does not exist in all of them. [More…]

• Senator Martin apparently disagrees but the facts remain that it has been in times of stress and economic tension that democracy is the most vulnerable. [More…]

• It was in similar times of inflation and unemployment that democracy collapsed in those countries in which it did collapse. [More…]

• If you are going to depart from the principles which govern a parliamentary democracy and make enough people think that, though they voted in an election and elected a party to govern, that is really meaningless and all sorts of steps can be taken to abort what they have tried to do with that vote, those people who are already dissatisfied because of economic circumstances and do not like the economic system will also have a contempt for the political system. [More…]

• We accept that amendment because we want to get a unanimous resolution of the Senate, but I hope that historians when they look back on the history of this debate will judge the integrity, the honesty and the consistency of those people who have talked so much about democracy and law and order but have done so much to damage and discredit them. [More…]

• The violence done to important conventions and well established customs by the Whitlam Government which has done and is doing violence to democracy itself. ‘ [More…]

• I think it is a sorry day for parliamentary democracy when we give to the Executive the power to disallow Acts of Parliament. [More…]

• Parliament should be supreme and to give to the Executive the power to disallow Acts of Parliament is a power which democracy gives away at its peril. [More…]

• It is a pretty shallow base and it is humbug for Senator Greenwood to prate about parliamentary democracy when he has voted, and led his Party to vote, against the inclusion of representatives of the Northern Territory in this chamber. [More…]

• There is another side to this matter of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I sincerely hope that that side of parliamentary democracy- the use of regulation making power- which will receive scrutiny in this place, and the safeguards of disallowance, if necessary, will be scrutinised by Northern Territory senators in this place. [More…]

• I have simply said that parliamentary democracy gives this power to the Executive at its peril. [More…]

• -Let me put it to Senator Wright in this way: It is possible today- because we have democracy in Australia- for minority groups to advertise expressing their views. [More…]

• Under this legislation there is an attempt to rape democracy in this community. [More…]

• I do not think anyone in this chamber would deny that democracy can be imperilled with’ the proliferation of lobbyists who abound in Canberra and in all capital cities. [More…]

• But some of the tactics that were used against John Gorton were not good for democracy. [More…]

• I say quite candidly that electoral developments in Australia and what happened at the time of Watergate are not good for democracy. [More…]

• Whether he gets done or not, that is a healthy form of democracy. [More…]

• That sort of democracy means that if somebody has a grievance and is well organised, without any of the sinister applications, he can reach his representative. [More…]

• This is the sort of situation in which people get a belly-full of democracy; they know that it is not fair. [More…]

• A democracy by definition does not work if half of the people do not take part in the process. [More…]

• I maintain that in regard to democracy 3 things are absolutely essential. [More…]

• It is not an irrelevant or uninteresting fact that in the last ten or twenty years attempts to introduce democracy into African countries have failed so dismally all over the continent. [More…]

• This has happened, not because there have been no people educated in the workings of democracy. [More…]

• That is one of the reasons why in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe there will not be any developed democracy because, apart from other reasons, there are no people who are able to exercise their facilities, their money and their time to produce assistance to political parties. [More…]

• Senator Mulvihill said in his speech that democracy could be imperilled by a proliferation of public relations. [More…]

• They have a right to interpret what the people of Australia wish the Senate to do, because this country is a democracy and is not an autocracy which is run by Mr Whitlam for Mr Whitlam ‘s views. [More…]

• No democracy can survive if it has not a responsible and recognisable brake within its constitutional set-up. [More…]

• In any democracy surely it is important for people to be able to pass judgment on a government as it proceeds along the line, otherwise there will be the establishment of a totalitarian circumstance from which there will be no return, no matter, to what end that totalitarian circumstance may be directed. [More…]

• I suggest that history is against Senator Scott and that his fears of the onset of some evil totalitarian regime, of some sinister plot by the Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) to demolish democracy, just do not hold water. [More…]

• I listened in vain for some argument designed to show that what was considered a progressive, sensible and moderate suggestion, as indeed it had to be, coming from a Committee of that composition, has suddenly become a proposition of fire-eating radicals with a sinister connotation of the subversion of democracy. [More…]

• Concerning the third reason that the Government gives for the introduction of this Bill, that is that the Government thinks it should be able to sue and be sued in its own courts, 1 think that in a parliamentary democracy no government should put itself above its people. [More…]

• But the Opposition does not recognise a mandate, lt was prepared to do the very thing which its former leader said was a falsification of democracy. [More…]

• -I should think that the proposition put forward by the Minister for Health would meet with the approval not only of the Royal Australian Nursing Federation and the other relevant unions but of all those concerned with democracy in industry and the participation of those who work within an industry in the management of that industry. [More…]

• Democracy is a system under which ordinary people express their will. [More…]

• By the use of this new economic democracy the Government, by threatening to reduce or even withdraw its commitment, will have control of the future management, extension, development and expansion of the State hospitals. [More…]

• Surely, under the form of parliamentary democracy we have, the Opposition, whether in the House of Representatives or in the Senate, ought to acknowledge that once a government assumes power, having put its programs to the people, those programs, having been properly identified, ought not to be resisted unless there are special circumstances. [More…]

• The greatest safeguard which a democracy has against attacks of this character is an awareness of what is occurring and a willingness, particularly by democratic means, to withstand the challenge which such forces represent. [More…]

• When he learnt of the possibility of the Senate taking this unprecedented action of refusing Supply this gentleman, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, described such action as a falsification of democracy. [More…]

• Is that what he thinks of democracy? [More…]

• This great upholder of democracy and of freedom, this well known kicker of the communist can, this well known union basher and professional gaoler of conscripts never went to Vietnam in his own right and had no intentions of going there. [More…]

• We collaborate and co-operate with our allies, but we do not get dragged along by the nose and do things that we are told to do that are against the very best principles of democracy, and against the very best principles of the Australian nation and the Australian people. [More…]

• This is electoral justice, it is democracy and in fact it is what we have now. [More…]

• The Bill is an assault on democracy; it is a Trojan horse. [More…]

• What sort of democracy is this? [More…]

• Is it democracy for the large and not for the small? [More…]

• It would mean an electorate so finely balanced as to require- in the name of democracy- the determination of the wishes of every voter. [More…]

• But in the Committee stage we will endeavour to delete or amend those offensive clauses which represent an assault on democracy. [More…]

• -This Bill is, in my opinion, essential in that it brings democracy closer to the people. [More…]

• I am fully aware of the immensely important area that we are discussing, for in a democracy we live under social, industrial and economic laws which are of necessity, if we are to survive, related to majority opinion. [More…]

• Surely in a democracy laws must reflect the majority opinion of the people of that country. [More…]

• I believe, as does Senator Melzer, that we should have an electoral system which promotes democracy in our country and which elects the people which the majority of voters wants to see in government. [More…]

• I suggest that in the areas in which we have our major amendments the Government, being concerned with democracy in this country, will in all probability agree with us. [More…]

• I suggest that this sort of attitude or this sort of result emphasises the fact that Australians, as electors and as members of a great democracy, have sufficient responsibility and intelligence to understand the sort of questions that are put before them. [More…]

• Of course, this bears very little relevance to democracy, because first past the post voting exists in a considerable number of countries around the world and in almost every instance it can be shown that minority governments result from a first past the post system. [More…]

• The first past the post system will bring about a situation in which there will ultimately be, as there seems to be in most of the countries that adopt it, a dictatorship of either the Right or the Left, and I am sure that this is not the objective of democracy in this or any other land where real and effective democracy still survives. [More…]

• This is the system which ensures that in a democracy the majority does not only appear to rule but does in fact rule. [More…]

• I believe that 70 per cent of this Bill is a satisfactory contribution, but those areas to which 1 have drawn attention are areas of extreme importance to the establishment and maintenance of a proper democracy in Australia. [More…]

• With all deference to Senator Scott and Senator Withers the whole idea seems to be that if these reforms are accepted in toto this will virtually strangle democracy. [More…]

• Taking Senator Scott’s argument to its logical conclusion, he advocates that the proliferation of parties is good for democracy. [More…]

• Let him consider the pre-Hitler era in Germany with a proliferation of parties which by their fragmentation of democracy ushered in Nazism, or the decline of the Fourth Republic in France, again with a proliferation of parties, and compare them with a democracy like Canada or Britain. [More…]

• The present Opposition has prated about democracy for 23 years, but while its members were in government they did nothing about electoral reform. [More…]

• We have talked about a threat to democracy. [More…]

• We make many glib references to democracy, but everybody knows that the great leveller is the fact that we cannot control who moves into an electorate and who moves out of it. [More…]

• I suppose that that is the greatest safeguard of democracy. [More…]

• While trying to ensure that the world is safe for democracy we should not ensure that the world is safe and cosy for just the largest parties in the community. [More…]

• This is a wonderful point about democracy. [More…]

• But we are a democracy catering for everybody and everybody should have an equal opportunity of recording their vote as do the great bulk of the people- by going along to a polling booth and recording their votes. [More…]

• We, as a democracy, should have our polling booths open for a sufficient time to give everybody a chance to vote on that day as the great majority of the people in Australia are able so to do. [More…]

• I know it is quite easy to say we should cut down the hours for voting but, when all is said and done, as a democracy our aims should be to get every vote possible and therefore whilst it might take a couple of hours longer than some people want I think that in the main the extra votes that come in really suit the true democratic purpose of this country. [More…]

• We are a democracy trying to sift out and find out what is the final thinking and decision of the people of this country so far as the elections for the Parliament is concerned. [More…]

• In a democracy a very precious privilege is for the people to vote and to elect the Party they want as the government. [More…]

• Democracy is a slow, lumbering process but, with all its faults, it is the best system so far as freedom and opportunity of the people are concerned. [More…]

• I think we must recognise that it is a slow lumbering process and that the people in a democracy are not perfectionists so far as voting is concerned. [More…]

• Of course elections are the backbone of any democracy and the makeup of the next Parliament will depend upon the form in which we finally pass this Bill. [More…]

• It seems to me that we are considering a Bill, the aim of which is, or should be, to amend the electoral laws to increase the chance of democracy functioning properly. [More…]

• If we take 3 days or 10 days or 5 weeks to learn the result of a Federal election, democracy is well served if it is the right result- using the word right’ in the sense that it is the result that the community wants. [More…]

• If the aim of the legislation is to improve democracy, we cannot really do so by disfranchising people. [More…]

• Let us have democracy at its best. [More…]

• The honourable senator talks parrot fashion about democracy but when I want to project my point of view he endeavours to interject with all sorts of irrelevancies. [More…]

• We should recognise that Parliament is the focal point of democracy. [More…]

• As I said in my speech on this Bill earlier tonight, we should make it as easy as possible for people to stand for Parliament and to serve democracy through the Parliament. [More…]

• As I have said, local government is the form of government from which all types of government in this democracy started. [More…]

• Has the Minister for Foreign Affairs noted the statement made by the Christian Democratic Party, which is the largest political party in Chile, that the present regime in Chile is fascist, tyrannical and brutal and that the people have the urgent task of restoring democracy in that unhappy land? [More…]

• Senator Withers has made his contribution and now he wants to deny everybody else the right to make a contribution, and he talks about democracy. [More…]

• 2) 1973, the Minister said this about electoral laws: if they are manipulated to reflect the political interest of persons or parties- it would be a denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• In a democracy eveybody should have an equal right. [More…]

• In this democracy, everybody should have an equal right in the recording of votes. [More…]

• To me the paramount thing is that in this democracy every citizen should have the right to vote in the same way as anybody else. [More…]

• As far as 1 am concerned everybody in this democracy counts the same and they have the same rights. [More…]

• It may be fashionable- certainly it may be fashionable with the present Government- to decry prospective revolutionary situations, but there are many democratic countries in this world which have lost their democracy because an internal revolutionary situation has developed in respect of which the Government of the day was not alerted. [More…]

• All Australian Governments through the years have acted in accordance with democratic principles encouraging a way of life acceptable to a democracy as opposed to totalitarian rule. [More…]

• They see a bureaucracy unfolding quite contrary to the principles of democracy in which responsible governments have delegated their authority to boards, commissions, corporations and authorities with power to supersede local government authority. [More…]

• What did we see of those heroic defenders of democracy? [More…]

• To me Parliament is the focal point of democracy. [More…]

• Has the Minister for Foreign Affairs noted the statement made by the Christian Democratic Party, which is the largest political party in Chile, that the present regime in Chile is fascist, tyrannical and brutal and that the people have, the urgent task of restoring democracy in that uphappy land? [More…]

• The Australian Government Liaison Service has been established on the premise and on the principle that the Australian people have a right to know what is going on in a democracy. [More…]

• We have opened them up on the principle that there has to be participatory democracy in the use of the airwaves of this country. [More…]

• I suggest that it is essential if we are to remain and maintain ourselves as a meaningful democracy that we have in our voting laws and in our voting system a capacity to determine that everything is not necessarily black or white. [More…]

• Yet one must recognise, if we want to maintain the liberal type of democracy which most of us have experienced and enjoyed, that there must be an allowance, a tolerance, for the dissemination of views to which one takes exception. [More…]

• It will be a milestone in the evolution of democracy in this country. [More…]

• Is he prepared to recognise the elementary right to free speech and communication which all citizens and organisations are entitled to enjoy in this democracy? [More…]

• There is only one way in which Australia can be ruled as a proper democracy and that is under the 2-Party system. [More…]

• But for those who propound the theory that there must be one vote one value or there is not democracy, I go on to another series of seats. [More…]

• Let it promote a referendum in which it says that, because it is so wedded to democracy in this country and to the principle of one vote one value, it intends to ask the electors of Australia to take away one Tasmanian seat. [More…]

• He has imbibed deeply of the Orwellian concept of Newspeak; that is, call gerrymander a democracy and call democracy a gerrymander, distract attention from your own villainies by planting them on your opponents. [More…]

• It has always been a process of democracy that minority groups have a say. [More…]

• There has been a lot of talk around the place about democracy. [More…]

• Senator Walsh has been making great forensic noises about democracy. [More…]

• People can talk about allowing a certain amount of tolerance, and we believe in that principle, but a 20 per cent tolerance is a complete negation of democracy. [More…]

• We have gone over this two or three times, and listening to Senator Baume and hearing other comments one would think we were some European country that was going through a political upheaval and that the light of democracy was going out. [More…]

• We believe it is an injection of vitamins into democracy at the ballot box. [More…]

• I should like to make a remark or two concerning equality of representation because I believe that in any democracy this is of extreme importance. [More…]

• Indeed the variance in virtually every democracy is enormously in excess even of a margin of 20 per cent. [More…]

• Yet when it puts m a representation for its own seats it puts in what amounts to a corruption of every principle of democracy. [More…]

• Again I ask: Is that democracy? [More…]

• Any Bill that refers to the educational circumstances of this country, which is a free enterprise democracy, must be of major importance. [More…]

• We must ensure that education in any field- certainly in the trade union field- will produce, or will aim to produce, a flexible and reasonable society, because it is only in this circumstance that a free democracy can survive. [More…]

• If we are to survive as a democracy, I believe that the public has to be kept fully aware of the options that it has and of the attitudes and priorities of the various organisations, educational and otherwise, that exist in our society. [More…]

• That is why it is inseparable from democracy and why, to be true to itself, it must work through a government responsible to a universally elected assembly. [More…]

• It is this confrontation between the unions and government which I think poses ultimately the greatest challenge which democracy in this country has had to face. [More…]

• Everybody knows now, of course, that the Labor Government in Australia is no different from any other government which practises democracy, as we do. [More…]

• From their own training they know all about marxism, social democracy and the principles of the Labor Party. [More…]

• We are a democracy and I believe that people have a right to express themselves if they think that the government of the day, whichever government it is, alters things in a way which is thought to be wrong so far as the developing and increasing of our population are concerned. [More…]

• When both of those things are gone there is some chance that democracy will return to Queensland. [More…]

• Yet Senator Sheil says that these people are living in a spirit of democracy. [More…]

• The other factor that does interest us very much is the problem that we see growing in every democracy around the world- I include this one- namely, the dichotomy between representation and management and the difficulty in getting into mesh an accelerated program of work. [More…]

• One would have thought that something was exceptional about this proposition from the way Senator Wright spoke, but I remind him that in that citadel of democracy, Queensland, the office of the Parliamentary Counsel is in the Premier’s Department. [More…]

• The people of all these parties have stood four-square for democracy throughout Western Europe and Asia: The party of Helmut Schmidt, the party of Sicco Mansholt, the party of Harold Wilson, the party of General Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel. [More…]

• All the parties 1 mentioned have stood four-square for democracy and have been the principal bulwarks against barbarism, whether they have come from countries which erroneously describe themselves as socialist, or which dishonestly describe themselves as democratic, like Senator Greenwood and Senator Wright. [More…]

• I do not want to traverse the ground covered by Senator Wheeldon, but it is worth drawing to the attention of the Senate that Mr Sule the Leader of the Radical Party, who came to this country, was able to convince all the members of Socialist International, which is representative of the broad stratum of social democracy on the international scene, of the terrorism that exists in Chile and of the unconstitutionality of the military group currently running affairs in that country. [More…]

• As has been argued by my colleagues, the Socialist International is a group of people who have pledged themselves to reform, to establish a system of social democracy by parliamentary action. [More…]

• It seems to me to be extraordinary when people in this Parliament say that they believe in parliamentary democracy and then start to defend the takeover of a parliamentary system by a military junta. [More…]

• The Senate has before it a Bill which would enable the Opposition to enshrine at least in one direction in industrial matters the principle of democracy in union management. [More…]

• In that sense we are a pluralist society and our functioning as a democracy depends upon having a government which is able to balance the competing interests and is able to make the necessary decisions as to which interests should have priority over another interest. [More…]

• The custodians of political decentralisation, of State autonomy and of grass roots democracy, sent their Canberra heavies to Perth to straighten out the Western Australian deviants. [More…]

• But the most credible versions, of course, is that these emissaries of the Canberra custodians of State autonomy, grass roots democracy and political decentralisation- that is the honourable member for New England (Mr Sinclair) and the right honourable member for Richmond (Mr Anthony) in the House of Representatives- portrayed to the Western Australians a terrifying picture of a Liberal-Country Party national explosion and therefore ordered their immature western followers to cease playing with detonators. [More…]

• The people appointed to it must be prepared to work hard and long to ensure that the impetus gained in establishing the site for the new house is not lost, and that the Austraiian nation can look forward to a building which reflects its national pride and the paramount importance we attach to the role and traditions of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The whole matter has been an exercise in democracy. [More…]

• That provision is being made exclusive so as to ringbark the State Supreme Courts and so the great panjandrum down below thinks he is going to have a judicial umbrella in a comprehensive Federal court and that that will create a judiciary that will interpret his laws according to social democracy. [More…]

• I say that in a parliamentary democracy no government is above its people and yet this Government wants to be above its people. [More…]

• When we find that the Opposition is incapable of even expressing a coherent point of view on the question of the reassembly of the Senate, we believe that democracy is in a very parlous condition. [More…]

• As Senator Steele Hall has been told more than once, and as he ought to know by now, Western Germany, for example, which is held to be a great example of parliamentary democracy, a most advanced democracy with good leadership, has such a law in existence at the present dme, and the effects on industry are certainly much more stringent. [More…]

• This is in accord with the principles on which our democracy is based. [More…]

• This is in accord with the principles on which our democracy is based. [More…]

• In closing my comments I say that, notwithstanding the arguments one way or the other that will apply in this debate, this is a sad day for the Senate, for the Parliament and for Australian democracy. [More…]

• There can be no greater blow to democracy than the admission of any right of the Executive to hamper, hinder or restrain members of this House from carrying out their duty to the nation. [More…]

• In this matter we, the Government, are acting according to principles of parliamentary democracy which have always- until today- been preached by our opponents. [More…]

• The citizen’s right to information is, according to Ralph Nader, the currency of democracy. [More…]

• Jim Spigelman’s Secrecy shows that in Australia the currency of democracy is being systematically withheld from the private citizen and, more often than not, from thc Government backbencher and the entire Opposition. [More…]

• Once the Public Service is undermined it is of no use talking about parliamentary democracy because it would be a shell without an honest, effective and impartial Public Service. [More…]

• it becomes a matter of urgency that the principle of the supremacy of Parliament in a democracy, and the respect due to it, should be asserted, and that public servants should- equally with members of the Cabinet- clearly recognise, and if necessary be made to recognise that principle. [More…]

• That maxim would be well served by resolute action by the Senate of a kind which will manifest to public officials generally that, in a democracy, the institution of Parliament is still paramount: that Cabinet derives what powers it may have from the Parliament, and not Parliament from the Cabinet; and that Parliament’s rights are, in essence, the rights of the citizen. [More…]

• There was rage about that leading to the refusal of Supply, an action which was once described in the Liberal Party as a denial of popular democracy. [More…]

• If the whim of the Senate is to be the basis determining whether a person can ask questions placed on notice it will be a complete denial of the democracy that should operate in a parliament. [More…]

• I believe the rights of all members of this Parliament, regardless of party, have to be protected if democracy is to be maintained. [More…]

• I know of no more degrading principle in any democracy than the one mouthed by the Prime Minister and repeated in the Budget. [More…]

• It does not make for true democracy to have on the one hand a campaign funded by the major commercial enterprises in this country and on the other hand a campaign funded by trade unions and ordinary people. [More…]

• We know well that there is no reality or democracy in a situation in which one man has the money to put an introductory card into a letter box and his rival has the money to saturate television and radio with advertisements giving his name over and over again. [More…]

• After the experiences of the last 2 elections, if this Parliament ignores the position, if it allows this dangerous situation to continue whereby democracy is made ridiculous by the inability of individual candidates to match the machines and the hysteria of Party machines becomes even more overpowering, then it will in retrospect look ludicrous and ridiculous. [More…]

• I do not think there could be any greater humbug than to hear people on the opposite side of the chamber talk about democracy and the will of the people. [More…]

• A great bogy has been built up in recent years- I suspect mainly for political purposes- that multinational corporations are menaces which threaten the very existence of democracy. [More…]

• It was significant too that during the whole of the speech the Leader of the Opposition- this man who claims to be upholding the fortress of democracy in Australia- only one pressman at any one time was in the Press gallery, and that it attracted from his colleagues on that side of the House only one of the proverbial parliamentary ‘Hear hears’. [More…]

• In relation to the overall inflation pattern, we know that in a democracy- and I use that word in a fairly broad sense- the greatest problem, unless it is in wartime, is to get the entire population to accept the various imposts, and that is particularly so in Australia. [More…]

• That is a dilemma in a democracy. [More…]

• It is an unhealthy situation when there is a manifestation of external meddling in a democracy. [More…]

• This is the difficulty in a democracy. [More…]

• If indeed it is the story of the inevitableand that may be somewhat simplistic- it is the province of government in a free democracy to ensure that that inevitability comes about not in weeks, months or years, but in the process of decades- indeed, of centuries. [More…]

• Government senators opposite say that they are not willing to pause for some weeks to consider a profound situation in which the whole philosophy of command inside this democracy may be under challenge, and that statement is supported by law. [More…]

• I am waiting for the Labor Party to show its democracy. [More…]

• We have created a bureaucracy which is entirely contrary to a democracy. [More…]

• If Baits, like many silly Liberals, constantly equate social democracy with communism, they may suggest to the more ignorant social democrats that this is only right and proper. [More…]

• Firstly, they endeavour to disrupt the economy basis of Western democracy. [More…]

• That is why it is inseparable from democracy and why, to be true to itself it must work through a government responsible to a universally elected assembly. [More…]

• Unless we gather to ourselves a sense of purpose, democracy in this country will find itself without support of the people outside, who through their misunderstanding of the mismanagement that takes place in this place, still have confidence in the institution. [More…]

• But for Senator Wright to suggest yesterday of all days that the absence of the Press and the standard of the Press was creating a danger to parliamentary democracy in this country was, I really think, a bit rich, especially as yesterday was the day on which we saw what the Premier of Queensland and his Government did to the democratic process. [More…]

• It was front page news and it should be front page news because what was done yesterday to parliamentary democracy was worthy of reporting whereas what Senator Wright and 1 say probably is not. [More…]

• It follows from that principle that it would be a falsification of democracy if, on any matter of Government policy approved by the House of Representatives, the Senate representing the States and not the people could reverse the decision. [More…]

• There is no doubting that the refusal of supply- that is what is hinted; do not let us hide our lights under a bushel- breaches the parliamentary system about which Senator Wright has so much to say and is contrary to the principles of democracy. [More…]

• I should like to say to Senator Wright that democracy is the opposite of tyranny and oppression and to give way in this instance would be tyranny in its worst form. [More…]

• When all is said and done, the working of the Parliament comes back to the basis of democracy, which is the people. [More…]

• Under a Labor government with its participatory democracy, we are all herded together. [More…]

• This is denial of the very essence of democracy and a travesty of the electoral process. [More…]

• I ask honourable senators to remember that it is those sorts of things which all of a sudden start the downturn and the rape of parliamentary democracy in this country. [More…]

• At the moment the Government is mounting a campaign in an attempt to show that somehow or other the Senate has brought democracy in Australia into disrepute because of its treatment of the Government’s so-called electoral reform. [More…]

• Any group of people, whether on the Right or the Left, which tries to subvert parliamentary democracy by going around the proper way of the ballot box ought to be condemned very roundly by all Australians. [More…]

• It was the Liberal Party which caused the sinking of the Lawson electorate but that did not in any way affect parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I say to succeeding speakers in this debate from the Liberal and Country Parties that they should study the table prepared by Mr Daly before they get up and say that there is democracy in New South Wales. [More…]

• We are treated by the Leader of the Opposition (Senator Withers) to a rather blase, off-the-cuff, throw-away laugh about democracy and morals. [More…]

• It seems to me rather sad that people of our ages come here and legislate to give the vote to 18- year-olds and then set them that sort of example, with glib talk about democracy and morals and about people’s involvement in the government of this country. [More…]

• It seems rather banal now to talk about democracy and what has happened to it, but when people are appointed to the Senate at the whim of a State Premier rather than by means of the votes of the people in that State being followed it makes democracy look rather sick. [More…]

• Relative to the continuity and development of a democracy must surely be, basically, the electoral system, the electoral laws and, indeed, the distribution of electorates under which that democracy operates. [More…]

• Political corruption of this type brings in its wake many great tragedies for democracy in this country. [More…]

• He is frightened to move into an area of democracy for his people. [More…]

• The Victorian Government says that that is democracy. [More…]

• Almost two out of every three people who vote for the Labor Party are disenfranchised under the Victorian system of democracy. [More…]

• It does not believe in democracy. [More…]

• The Bill which is passing in South Australia this week will establish democracy in South Australia for the first time since the inception of the Westminster style of government. [More…]

• The point I was trying to make, Senator Chaney, for the benefit of people like yourself is that it is not really relevant to recite what happened for many years in various States such as New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia in trying to decide what the great Senate to which we all belong should do in 1975; what it should decide about the future of parliamentary democracy in Australia; and what it should decide about fairness in electoral matters in Australia. [More…]

• In another article in the Melbourne Age newspaper of 13 February this year under the title, ‘Democracy gets a shake-up- Federal redistribution a step towards ending gerrymanders ‘, the author said this: [More…]

• But once again one beats the air in this extraordinary chamber about questions which are of concern particularly to young people in this country and to people who are seeking a solution, seeking, if you like, an ideal in which to believe in terms of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• This debate, which, as I said, is being conducted in a mood of perhaps cynicism and is boring to people like myself because we have been through it so often before, is nonetheless very important to the future of Australia and to the future of people who are concerned that parliamentary democracy should survive, produce and flourish in this country. [More…]

• -I ask the Leader of the Government in the Senate whether in the interests of democracy and in view of the criticism of Sir Charles Court he would arrange for leave of absence for Senator Carrick to enable him to finish his paper on federalism. [More…]

• I was rather delightfully surprised to read in yesterday’s West Australian a letter from a Mr Michael Beech who appears to be one of the few members of the Liberal Party who apparently want to uphold the traditions of Australian parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I should think that it would be manifest to the public that the reason why certain events have occurred in the past couple of days is that the Prime Minister of this country, in accordance with the highest tradition of parliamentary democracy, insisted that a Minister who had misled the Parliament should pay the fullest penalty for such action. [More…]

• They have been searching for an issue on which to try to justify the breaking of probably the last convention insofar as parliamentary democracy is concerned. [More…]

• I suggest to honourable senators opposite that as a result of what they have in mind the civilised political contest, which is the only basis of the preservation of democratic government based on a reasonable consensus, will disappear and that the rules of parliamentary democracy and the contest in the framework of parliamentary democracy will be taken out of the Parliament into the streets. [More…]

• It is about to take the final step- a step which could well spell out the end of political stability and, regrettably, political democracy in this country. [More…]

• The greatest issue involved in any democracy is the preservation of democracy. [More…]

• Despite the fact that the Government went to the people and got a majority of votes, the Senate upheld its right above the people and above democracy. [More…]

• They are no longer interested in democracy. [More…]

• We have an obligation under our democracy to uphold the voice of the people, and uphold it we will. [More…]

• To attempt to prevent the people exercising this judgment is a denial of democracy. [More…]

• The Senate tonight demeans the institution of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It could not happen anywhere else in the sort of parliamentary democracy which we sometimes purport to admire. [More…]

• It involves the future of parliamentary democracy in Australia. [More…]

• That was an action described by the godfather of the Liberal Party as a denial of popular democracy. [More…]

• Not only is there that vast discrepancy in the concept of popular democracy in this House but also there are other people who are here under false colours. [More…]

• Those are the rules of parliamentary democracy in Australia as they will apply from now on. [More…]

• Only last week did we talk about the institution of parliamentary democracy, its importance and the enlargement of the opportunities for Australian people to take part in political life when we debated the question of the redistribution of electorates. [More…]

• They all stood up and said: ‘Look, in the 1930s the Labor Party did this in Queensland, and in the 1940s the Labor Party did this in New South Wales, and the Liberal Party might have done it in South Australia’, as if that was relevant to the sort of question of principle about which people concerned with the survival of parliamentary democracy in Australia ought to be bothered. [More…]

• I say now, as I said in those debates, that if parliamentary democracy is to survive in this country it must not only be seen to work but also must be fair and be seen to be fair. [More…]

• I am fully convinced that the abuse of Party politics is posing a threat to parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It follows from this principle that it would be a falsification of democracy if on any matter of government policy approved by the House of Representatives, possibly by a large majority, the Senate representing the States and not the people could reverse the decision. [More…]

• The fear is now being expressed that this fragile democracy that we hear so much about could be shattered. [More…]

• I cannot see how a democracy can be destroyed by giving the people a chance to judge their Government in a time of crisis. [More…]

• It is the accepted true fundamental convention of the Westminster system of responsible government that if a government cannot secure the approval of the Parliament of its Budget or money proposals with which to carry on the government, then the monarch is so advised and one of 2 consequences ensues: Either the monarch or the monarch ‘s representative calls upon another member of the Parliament to form a government in the belief that that new government will secure the approval of its Budget or monetary proposals; or the defeated Prime Minister is given the right to have an election and, in a democracy, to let the people make the final decision. [More…]

• When in a democracy should a democrat cavil at the people’s judgment? [More…]

• There is no principle involved; it is basically this fundamental question in a democracy: Shall the people have an opportunity to judge and shall we abide by the decision of those who are the masters of us all? [More…]

• They say, with Sir Isaac Isaacs, of the Victorian upper House’s rejection of Supply in 1947, that rejection is a grave blow to democracy. [More…]

• Since Victorian democracy and stable government still flourish, perhaps one should conclude that good lawyers make bad prophets. [More…]

• They are essentially political judgments and political judgments will be tested by those who in a democracy are the ultimate judges. [More…]

• One needs only to look back at the last great depression which began in 1929 to see how, as a result of that great depression and how as a result of the fact that certain persons took advantage of the disorders which were created by that depression to push their own narrow interests, democracy was destroyed in a great many countries throughout Europe. [More…]

• It has been said before- I will say it againthat democracy is a very fragile plant. [More…]

• In the neighbouring countries of Argentina and Uruguay, particularly Uruguay which is a country with a model social services system- again, no banana republic- a country whose system of government was based on a parliamentary system with a most complex system of proportional representation, democracy has been destroyed. [More…]

• The same thing happened in the 1930s when democracy was destroyed in Germany, Austria and Spain. [More…]

• I have seen them vote for motions to bring down a democratically elected government, while people on this side have argued that democracy should be preserved. [More…]

• How can we now go to working people throughout this country, some of whom are looking for an excuse to cause trouble, and say: ‘You must abide by representational democracy and the parliamentary system’ when they will be able to say: ‘Whitlam won 2 elections in 18 months and we have seen what happens’. [More…]

• -I do not think Senator Greenwood is as concerned about the constitutionality of the situation and the procedures of democracy as he is about getting into power. [More…]

• It is an irony for Senator Greenwood to talk about democracy being determined by the vote of the people. [More…]

• Democracy has been determined by the vote of the Australian people twice in the last 3 years. [More…]

• In the most emotional manner he talks of threats to democracy and the importance of stable government, and I agree with him on that because at this moment democracy is threatened in Australia. [More…]

• He and he alone is attempting to destroy democracy, because the Opposition in the Senate has done nothing more than seek an expression of the people’s will. [More…]

• It must be remembered that democracy is not the provision of an absolute licence to a Prime Minister. [More…]

• Democracy depends upon the Parliament. [More…]

• It is the Parliament and not the Prime Minister which is the custodian of democracy. [More…]

• As yet, Australia has no one-man guided democracy. [More…]

• The Senate will not retreat before this onslaught on the powers of the Parliament because the Senate is fighting for democracy and for the Constitution. [More…]

• If Parliament is denied that right, democracy is denied and Parliament becomes irrelevant. [More…]

• If this Prime Minister is allowed to continue his falsehoods, his deceptions and his ravaging of the rights of the people and the Parliament, democracy is indeed ended. [More…]

• This last shred of democracy has survived, despite the Prime Minister’s avowed determination to destroy Parliament and the country in the process. [More…]

• Words like ‘democracy’ roll from his lips but not from his mind. [More…]

• It is the Prime Minister who is defying democracy. [More…]

• If honourable senators opposite were responsible, if they were a party of moralists, if they agreed with the Constitution and if they wanted to preserve parliamentary democracy they would have regard for that situation to which I have referred and denounce it. [More…]

• It is amazing to me that the great advocates of parliamentary democracy over the years, the people who challenged all the new revolutionary movements in other parts of the world and talked about the Red thrust from South East Asia, from Saigon, about the danger to parliamentary democracy and about the great powers of the trade unions, should now seek to use a power which is badly based. [More…]

• The propositions contained in the amendment mean nothing to me but deception- the use of words to try to convey to the people that the Opposition is not seeking power but that it wants parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• There is no question that the rather militant speeches in this place by some of my colleagues about the threat to parliamentary democracy point to a very real situation. [More…]

• It is our job to worry about parliamentary democracy and to see that the institutions of the Parliament are respected and preserved. [More…]

• I do not think that the Opposition has done anything to preserve the idea of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If we did that it could well mean the end of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The power exists, and because this Government is the worst government since Federation, because it is dishonest, because it is disastrously inefficient, because it has brought this country to the edge of economic chaos, the Senate Opposition, in company with the Opposition in the House of Representatives, is using the means and the responsibility provided for it in the Constitution to do one thing and one thing alone, that is, to ask the people of Australia to judge whether this is a good or a bad government- who shall deny it the right to do this in a democracy? [More…]

• It is a denial of democracy for a government to try to insulate itself against the ballot box. [More…]

• It talks of the lack of democracy. [More…]

• The test of democracy is the ballot box. [More…]

• The second allegation that needs to be analysed runs something like this: The money power in a democracy ought not to lie in an upper House; that if it does, the evolution of the Westminster system suggests that it ought not to and the only reason it still lies in our Constitution is that we have not got around to amending the power. [More…]

• I would like to believe also that the people who helped put this Government into office are those from Europe who thought parliamentary democracy would work here. [More…]

• As a matter of fact, a Greek friend of mine last week said that our country was supposed to be the home of democracy but we have seen the parliamentary system prostituted. [More…]

• If the Opposition likes to have those idiots to make up their numbers, that is a pretty poor attitude to democracy. [More…]

• Members of the Opposition know in their hearts when they talk about the ballot box and democracy that we do not have a democratic system. [More…]

• To talk of a breakdown of democracy, as [More…]

• I suggest that the present Government has developed to an alarming degree both of those components for a breakdown of democracy. [More…]

• The Opposition would remind the Prime Minister, although he already acknowledges it, that in this country the system of parliamentary democracy is that we have at the head a monarch, that we have 2 Houses of Parliament, and that a Bill cannot be enacted unless it passes through both Houses of the Australian Parliament. [More…]

• There is no danger to true democracy when the people have a right to use the processes that are in their own Constitution to deal with this very situation. [More…]

• They were drowned out by the number of supporters of democracy who came along and said: Fraser should not be doing what he is doing’. [More…]

• It is not about political convention or constitutional democracy. [More…]

• We are not inciting revolution; we are looking for democracy in this country because we are one of the few democratic nations left in a world that is torn with strife at the moment. [More…]

• We are one of the few democratic nations that in actual fact can hold its head up- or could until last week- and say: ‘We are a democracy and we believe that every person in this country has the right to vote on issues’. [More…]

• I see it as rape, pure and simple- rape of democracy, rape of the people of Australia- and the Opposition’s attitude is that of the rapist who argues that any damage that is done is caused by the resistance of the victim. [More…]

• Indeed, the Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) has said on a number of occasions that democracy is a fragile plant. [More…]

• Indeed, if that is the circumstance then there is no challenge to democracy. [More…]

• In other words, in that circumstance the fragile plant of democracy will survive- but only in that circumstance. [More…]

• The government in this country, as in any democracy, has to be judged on its performance. [More…]

• If the Parliament becomes unworkable by destruction of convention, democracy itself becomes unworkable because democracy rests much more on adherence to convention than to the rigid application of rules and laws. [More…]

• If we add to that list the problems created by the behaviour of Parliament itself, the destruction of convention, the defiance of reason, the pursuit of power without concern for the rights or privileges of minorities, then Australians will have little faith in the future of Australian democracy. [More…]

• That is the threat to the Australian democracy. [More…]

• It is not only a threat to the Australian democracy as we know it, it is a threat to the federal situation as we know it. [More…]

• The Government has the hide to do it in the name of preserving democracy. [More…]

• That is the ultimate in democracy. [More…]

• He was referring to some previous issues in the evolution of democracy- the people’s control of the Executive and the moneys raised and spent by the Executive through the people ‘s control of the lower House, the people’s House. [More…]

• The taxpayers’ control over their money through their elected representatives in the people’s House is the foundation of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The essence of a democracy lies very simply in the answer to the question: Who controls the purse strings? [More…]

• The development of democracy in our Western civilisation was the result of a demand that those who finance a government have a say in the disbursement of that finance. [More…]

• Concurrent with that right, that privilege of democracy, there is the responsibility of all elected members to take upon themselves the task of surveying government expenditure, deciding whether the Government is acting as it should, and whether that power of the purse is being exercised as it should be. [More…]

• He and he alone is attempting to destroy democracy. [More…]

• It should be of concern to all who want stable government, who worry about the future planning and development of this country and who worry about the preservation of the parliamentary system of democracy in this country. [More…]

• They will join the few extremists present on both sides of politics in this country who do not believe in a parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• As I was saying before Senator Sir Magnus Cormack interrupted me, in fact there are people in this country who are extremists, people who, unlike those of us here, do not believe in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is no good me and others on this side of the chamber who believe in a parliamentary democracy saying to these people: ‘Look, this is a one-off situation. [More…]

• The other thing for which I do not care one little bit is this rubbish that is being fed out by honourable senators opposite about the challenge to democracy, about violence and about riots in the streets. [More…]

• It is one ofthe most firmly established principles of British Parliamentary democracy that a House of Review should not reject the financial decisions of the popular House. [More…]

• The argument of Mr Killen was based, as was that of Sir Robert Menzies, on the principles of democracy underlying the Constitution. [More…]

• So much is at stake in the interests of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• As to the question of resolving these matters by the ballot box, I hoped that Senator Greenwood would have adopted a genuinely democratic attitude on the question of electoral redistribution when this Government was trying to bring in legislation which would create genuine democracy in the ballot box in this country. [More…]

• We have to tell them what is happening to their country, what is happening to the instruments of Parliament, and what is happening to parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If the Parliament becomes unworkable by destruction of convention, democracy itself becomes unworkable because democracy rests much more on adherence to convention than to the rigid application of the rules of law. [More…]

• If a significant minority feels that the democratic processes are so loaded against them that they can never be successful, then that democracy has in store a dangerous and difficult time in which great tolerance and understanding would be required. [More…]

• In the interests of democracy they must be withstood. [More…]

• It would be a falsification of popular democracy. [More…]

• It is one of the most firmly established principles of British parliamentary democracy that a House of review should not reject financial decisions of the popular House. [More…]

• The Opposition’s attitude towards the rest of the Government’s legislation in the intervening period has indicated that it is on a course to make parliamentary democracy unworkable in this country. [More…]

• In the normal sequence of events, without creating the conditions which now have placed parliamentary democracy in peril and without creating the public furore and concern that exists now within the Australian community, the Opposition would now, according to its judgment, be ready to assume the political and economic management of this country. [More…]

• It is denying the fundamental principles of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is denying a right of government which has been written about by all of the legal and constitutional writers and all of the defenders of democracy. [More…]

• Falsification of popular democracy’ [More…]

• It would be a falsification of democracy if, on any matter of government policy approved by the House of Representatives, possibly by a large majority, the Senate representing the States and not the people, could reverse the decision. [More…]

• This would be absurd, as a denial of popular democracy. [More…]

• -I ask for leave of the Senate to lay on the table a document signed by 262 citizens of Australia calling on the Senate to withdraw its threat to reject the Budget and expressing the view that any other action by the Senate could endanger the future of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• One of the distinguishing features of parliamentary democracy is the absolute rule of law. [More…]

• One of the distinguishing features of parliamentary democracy is the absolute rule of law. [More…]

• I think we ought to have regard to that in this place where we are safeguarding democracy where we are exercising our proper rights and responsibilities and where we would be totally negligent were we not to do so. [More…]

• But to have the president of a political party privy to Budget Speech detail some 6 hours before its presentation is, to say the least, one of the most disgraceful and reprehensible pieces of behaviour of any government in any democracy for quite a long time. [More…]

• The longer that this constitutional crisis persists the deeper and more permanent will be the wounds that it inflicts on the fragile system of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I repeat what I have said and what other speakers on this side of the Senate have said throughout this crisis: The issue is not the economy; the issue is the survival of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• So it is certainly stretching all of the known concepts of democracy to suggest that this is a House which is as representative of the will of the people as is the House of Representatives. [More…]

• Why has this preferential treatment been given in the releasing of the Budget Papers in this age of what the present Government has been pleased to describe as participatory democracy? [More…]

• If we are prepared to refuse the granting of Supply we are creating a breakdown in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I believe parliamentary democracy to be the only acceptable form of government for Australia. [More…]

• But many who have been troubled by social injustices in the community have questioned the ability of democracy to remedy them. [More…]

• If the denial of Supply were allowed to lead to the displacement of the Government the number of doubters of democracy would increase alarmingly. [More…]

• The continuation of democracy requires political parties to do more than exact their constitutional pound of flesh. [More…]

• It requires restraint so as to comply with the basic assumptions and practices that make democracy workable. [More…]

• That is the difference between the 2 systems of democracy and totalitarianism. [More…]

• I am one of those who values greatly indeed the blessings which have been bestowed upon me, upon other honourable gentlemen and upon the Australian community by the system of” democracy. [More…]

• That system of democracy is now at stake. [More…]

• Now again, in their craving for power, in their addiction to a Cassius Clay philosophy of greater than thou, they have turned aside the long, well established, well understood, accepted and acclaimed standards of democracy and convention. [More…]

• The simple fact of the matter is whether we like it or not- quite frankly, I do not like saying it- if the late Senator Milliner were alive today, and he passed away a mere 3 months ago, the Opposition would not be able to conduct itself as it is conducting itself today in challenging the convention of elective parliamentary democracy by moving its amendment for deferral of the Budget. [More…]

• As members of the Opposition polarised and divided this great nation and the Australian people in respect of Vietnam when they were in office, so too are they now polarising the people and the Australian nation by their tearing up of the long established principles of democracy and the conventions which bring about stability and confidence within a nation. [More…]

• In making provision for that basis of democracy, those conventions also provide for the protection of the rights of the Opposition and for the protection of the rights of minority sections in the community. [More…]

• It is they who are depriving the people of democracy in this country. [More…]

• If we are to be practical about things, when we listen to the waffle coming from the other side of the chamber we must say that it is a very sad day for democracy. [More…]

• If the Parliament becomes unworkable by destruction of convention, democracy itself becomes unworkable because democracy rests much more on adherence to convention than to the rigid application of rules and laws. [More…]

• I want to quote the contents of this letter because I believe for the sake of democracy it also ought to appear in the Hansard record. [More…]

• There is the tradition., the mythology of the Liberal Party as the upholder of convention in Australia and the upholder of enlightened conservatism, of alternative policies and of addiction to principle and to fair play in order that the parliamentary system might survive as the basic institution of democracy as we know it. [More…]

• 1 do not wish to go into the rather turgid details with which we have dealt previously in the Senate concerning the Liberal Party’s failure to comply with the great conventions of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The sooner some of the more liberal members in Mr Fraser’s Party stand up to him and say: ‘This far, no further’, the sooner democracy will be allowed to go on and the Government to get down to the job, the economy to be brought back into its proper perspective and the Australian people to see the further results of Labor legislation flow. [More…]

• If the Parliament becomes unworkable by destruction of convention, democracy itself becomes unworkable because democracy rests much more on adherence to convention than to the rigid application of rules and laws. [More…]

• If we add to that list the problems created by the behaviour of Parliament itself, the destruction of convention, the defiance of reason, the pursuit of power without concern for the rights or privileges of minorities, then Australians will have little faith in the future of Australian democracy. [More…]

• Where is the democracy in that when the issue is whether the Opposition will act in the manner in which it has acted by denying Supply? [More…]

• It is simply an issue which will ultimately have to be determined, as are all political issues in this democracy, at the ballot box. [More…]

• So it is certainly stretching all of the known concepts of democracy to suggest that this is a House which is as representative of the will of the people as is the House of Representatives. [More…]

• It would be bold of me to assert that this has happened only on the other side of the chamber but I do think it has been unhelpful to democracy in Australia that there has been an attempt to justify positions on the basis of principle when in part those stances are based on politics. [More…]

• At those times the people always used phrases, such as they claimed to be acting in the interests of the people; they were responding to the call of the nation; or they were acting in defence of the best interests of the people and in defence of democracy. [More…]

• The petition of the Legislative Assembly respectfully showeth: that the avowed intention of the Australian Parliament to further the interests of democracy and parliamentary government in the Territory is being frustrated by the executive and administrative arms of government. [More…]

• It has been properly said that whilst a government is prepared to face the people- its masters- then and then only is democracy safe; then and then only is democracy not at stake. [More…]

• If the Parliament becomes unworkable by destruction of convention, democracy itself becomes unworkable because democracy rests much more on adherence to convention than to the rigid application of rules and laws. [More…]

• Why, in a democracy, should any democrat cavil at the people’s judgment? [More…]

• The greatest democracy in AsiaIndia -is acknowledged on all sides to have recently become a dictatorship. [More…]

• If we have a Prime Minister who claims to be able to govern without the Budget Bills- without the Appropriation Bills- he is pursuing a course which is fraught with peril for democracy. [More…]

• It remains a matter of concern for the world that the situation in Lebanon should have been seized from the hands of the elected representatives, and that the Lebanese experiment in multicommunal democracy should have been brought by violence to the brink of failure. [More…]

• We believe in conventions; we believe in the practice of parliament; we believe in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I think that one of the reasons for our downfall, apart from being the victims of one of the most gruesome conspiracies in parliamentary democracy, is that our opponents were able to portray us as enemies of business. [More…]

• I have always regarded the Australian Parliament as the symbol of liberty, freedom, democracy, free speech, and indeed quiet thought. [More…]

• I want honourable senators on the Government side to ponder seriously these events because I believe that those honourable senators are as interested as we are in seeing the preservation of parliamentary democracy in this country- a system whereby men and women are elected to come to this Parliament to speak on behalf of their constituents and whereby the party with the greatest number of people elected to the floor of the House of Representatives forms the constitutionally elected government. [More…]

• We want the system of democracy to exist because God forbid what may happen to the future of this country if this system is replaced by anything else. [More…]

• Each and every member of the Government and of the Opposition- all members of this Parliament- who believe in the principle of parliamentary democracy and the principle that the majority should exercise the rule with the protection of the rights of the minority have to see that the events which took place on 1 1 November last never occur again. [More…]

• I am honestly and firmly of the opinion that parliamentary democracy in Australia suffered a great blow with the events of last year. [More…]

• This is not the first occasion on which other members of the Australian Labor Party and I have risen to our feet to declare our support for parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I say again that parliamentary democracy was struck a very heavy blow. [More…]

• We are talking about countries such as Japan and West Germany, that great western democracy. [More…]

• I conclude by saying what I said earlier Parliamentary democracy in Australia has received a great setback. [More…]

• It is a great pity that my good friend Senator Bishop- I know he is a good friend- says that democracy is being shattered and all this sort of nonsense. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite were outraged and said that democracy had been raped and that the Constitution had been torn up. [More…]

• Indeed I think at that time what we saw was democracy in action. [More…]

• I have noticed Opposition senators saying that they now fear for the future of parliamentary democracy and the protection of minorities. [More…]

• That shows that the Opposition believes that majority rule is parliamentary democracy, which is not so because majority rule simply means that the guy with the biggest gang is calling the tune. [More…]

• I submit that there was then no threat to democracy and that there is now no threat to democracy. [More…]

• With the introduction of secret ballots and a little democracy in union representation, I look forward to a dramatic change in the relationship between the employers, the Government and the unions. [More…]

• Senator Sheil has said that we have claimed that these events brought an end to democracy. [More…]

• I say that democracy was greatly shaken as a result of the events of 11 November and 13 December. [More…]

• If a media magnate can decide who shall be in government in Australia where is democracy in Australia? [More…]

• How can we have a democracy in that situation? [More…]

• It is very comforting to know that a person with those very qualities is in the Chair in this period when our democracy and our system of government are under some challenge. [More…]

• I believe that those empty seats provided mute evidence not of protest but of insult to the very institution that the Australian democracy needs so desperately to maintain and develop. [More…]

• I find it most extraordinary that we should be concerning ourselves today and over this last week with Opposition efforts in this chamber to assert that the action of the Senate was a threat to democracy and the action of the GovernorGeneral, as the ultimate force in the constitutional set-up of this country, was in some measure a threat to democracy. [More…]

• Surely if any democracy is to be retained in this country there must be the circumstance when a government can be forced to ask the people whether it should continue on the lines that it proposes or whether it should be displaced. [More…]

• The fact that such an election was forced is surely the very essence of democracy. [More…]

• Yet we are still being belaboured in this chamber by suggestions that on 1 1 November democracy was dealt a terrible blow by the then Opposition through the Senate and through the ultimate decision of the GovernorGeneral. [More…]

• I recall Patrick White at that time saying of the events of 1 1 November that although there was no tanks, no troops around and no guns he felt that there was something sinister for democracy. [More…]

• What could there be sinister for democracy in a circumstance in the operation of a constitution, which saw the Australian people given the opportunity to go thoughtfully, responsibly and quietly to cast their vote in secret ballot. [More…]

• There is no threat or challenge to democracy in that. [More…]

• While that remains the province of the Australian people I believe that democracy in this country is secure. [More…]

• Its purpose is to work with the people to create an Australian democracy which will be an example to the world of what a free people can achieve. [More…]

• Surely the role of government must be to establish in Australia a climate in which the basic facets of Australian free enterprise democracy can survive, evolve and grow. [More…]

• What is this free enterprise democracy? [More…]

• I suggest that there are many basic facets of free enterprise democracy. [More…]

• I mention one other facet of Australian democracy. [More…]

• As the Speech suggests, it must remain the servant of the people and only then will democracy survive. [More…]

• In that situation a democracy such as we propose and such as we have developed cannot survive. [More…]

• We cannot afford it financially and it does not fit into democracy. [More…]

• Its purpose is to work with the people to create an Australian democracy which will be an example to the world of what a free people can achieve. [More…]

• I felt sad on behalf not only of myself but also of the people throughout Australia who believed that they lived in a democracy. [More…]

• Democracy died on November 1 1 last year. [More…]

• Australia is not a democracy. [More…]

• We have to stop believing that it is a democracy. [More…]

• Rememberance Day of 1976 and of every year thereafter will be the day on which free-thinking Australians will bow their heads for the customary 2 minutes silence, not for those who died in the great wars but for the death of democracy in this country. [More…]

• It is the only way that we can restore and maintain a democracy in this country. [More…]

• I wonder how the honourable senator can sustain an argument of that type when the people of Australia, many of whom voted for the Australian Labor Party in May 1 974, decided in December last that it was time to return to true democracy and gave the Liberal-National Country Party resounding support. [More…]

• It first happened when Charles I .sacked the reigning Prime Minister, which was the start of democracy. [More…]

• But what has to be said and certainly what the newly-elected senators have to learn is that what one says in this place has very little relevance, very little value, in terms of parliamentary democracy, in terms of one’s contribution to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and in terms of one’s understanding of the way in which our society operates. [More…]

• It was a dangerous step that was taken, and it was a step that did more to damage the fabric of democracy in this country than 50 years of propaganda by any revolutionary group at all. [More…]

• It has always been my belief that the maintenance of the family as a basic unit of society is essential to our way of life in our Australian democracy. [More…]

• As I said earlier in my speech- I also said it some 20 months ago in my maiden speech in the Senate- I believe that the most important issue which confronts any government in any democracy in the 1970s is the capacity to understand and manage the sorts of changes which are taking place in our society and in the world at large. [More…]

• But what has to be said and certainly what the newlyelected senators have to learn is that what one says in this place has very little relevance, very little value, in terms of parliamentary democracy, in terms of one’s contribution to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and in terms of one’s understanding of the way in which our society operates. [More…]

• From what I heard of their speeches, I do not think that the new senators were wasting their time and I believe that together we will see whether the power can be restored to the people through the system of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Ideally, in a parliamentary democracy power should be exercised in consultation and cooperation with elective organisations within the community, in preserving the integrity of institutions within society and in recognising that power should be kept close to the people and not manipulated by the corporate State method. [More…]

• What are we doing for other institutions in these countries to foster the ideals of grass-roots democracy? [More…]

• So much for democracy and so much for the redistribution Bill which was not passed because the then Opposition in the Senate would not pass it. [More…]

• But it was a great lesson in democracy to have that Bill refused. [More…]

• We should have told the people of Australia more strongly and more often that if they valued democracy and a way of life they should look very closely at whatever moves the people who now form the Government take. [More…]

• Anybody who has seen the working of the Constitution, the recent opportunity which Australian democracy had to give expression to its purpose, the people round the country - [More…]

• Australian democracy has had an opportunity to express its purpose of the Crown and of the Parliament pivoted on the judiciary. [More…]

• I think the American Parliament has done a great service to the people of the world who believe in democracy by examining the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and in revealing the kinds of activities in which that organisation has been involved in the last few years. [More…]

• It is because ASIO indulged in activities which lowered the standing of the intelligence service in the eyes of the Australian people, particularly in the eyes of those Australians who care very much about democracy and the rights of the individual, that an investigation and reform of [More…]

• The CIA has been built up by the denigrators of America as one of the nasty organisations which in some way is regarded as a threat to democracy. [More…]

• I tried to explain that it was very doubtful that this would happen in a country like Australia where we have known democracy and where it is respected. [More…]

• Finally, with regard to the present unjust and inequitable electoral system which operates in Australia, one finds the Government uninterested in reform, reform which is necessary in order to guarantee the future viability of Australian parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If the electoral process does not properly reflect the commitments of the voters but rather frustrates them, then it can only serve to bring the entire concept of parliamentary democracy in this country into disrepute. [More…]

• It becomes even more vital, therefore, to state that reform of the existing electoral machinery, together with other iniquities which mar Australian political democracy, should occupy a higher priority for any administration which is honestly concerned with Australia’s future as a democratic country. [More…]

• It is a sorry state of so-called democracy in Australia when the deposed Prime Minister, the present Leader of the Opposition (Mr Whitlam), is unable to speak about the detail that surrounded the negotiations, or whatever, which involved the downfall of his Government. [More…]

• This is a so-called democracy yet, despite the action that has been taken, no reasons have been given for it. [More…]

• This is not my conception of the operation of democracy. [More…]

• 1 hope that it will reverse that trend because any emphasis on an extension of democracy, which were the brave new words in the Governor-General’s Speech, in this era, or whatever it is called, will be simply nothing- it will be ashes- if it is not accompanied by the opening up of government and a participation by people instead of the Government ruling them. [More…]

• The result is that there will be an early general election for both Houses and the people can do what, in a democracy such as ours, is their responsibility and duty and theirs alone. [More…]

• The result is that there will be an early general election for both Houses and the people can do what, in a democracy such as ours, is their responsibility and duty and theirs alone. [More…]

• The Government believes that the independence of individual members of the Parliament is vital to democracy. [More…]

• Such a situation would be offensive to every concept of parliamentary democracy in Australia. [More…]

• It is one of the most firmly established principles of British parliamentary democracy that a House of Review should not reject the financial decisions of the popular House. [More…]

• The fact that the majority of voters endorsed the amazing and unprecedented act of the Governor-General does not undo the damage that was done to our Constitution and to the conventions that have preserved democracy in Australia to date. [More…]

• There are reports of the decline of Western style democracy and of continuing corruption and of political instability. [More…]

• Its purpose is to work with people to create an Australian democracy, which will be an example to the world of what a free people can achieve. [More…]

• It is the ultimate paradox that the less developed countries reject and denigrate the system of one man one vote in their own countries but they demand and exploit the right of one state one vote in the General Assembly because they do not understand democracy’s ground rules. [More…]

• Some people believe that we would be emulating some of those leaders in darkest Africa if the Leader of the Opposition in a democracy such as ours could be under the threat of legal action and of its consequences for sedition. [More…]

• In a liberal democracy the views of all levels of Government and of the community should be sought and taken into account in taking such decisions. [More…]

• Much of what has been achieved in the period since the 1939-45 war finished in the way of ensuring that Australians became a nation of home owners- a nationwide property owning democracy- has been due to the policies which the Liberal and Country Party governments followed in the years when they were in government. [More…]

• They are major trading partners, they share common strategic interests and they are 2 great democracies in an area where democracy is not the common form of government. [More…]

• Australia and Japan are nations whose histories, culture and development, I believe, until recently have rarely had much in common, although we have ideals in common expressed through the institution of parliamentary democracy and through the industry of our respective peoples. [More…]

• If we can ever get this Government to be generous enough, when an attack is made on parties or individuals, at least to give an opportunity for someone to reply without the Government’s taking up the whole of the time available by using its numbers and thus showing that there is a lack of democracy in the Senate and an inability for an Opposition to present its case, I look forward to an opportunity to reply and show the association between the court activity and the words of Senator Harradine. [More…]

• Preserve Democracy in Trade Unions by guaranteeing the right of all members to participate in rank and file ballots for officials and Committees of Management. [More…]

• Mr Whitlam said that he welcomed the visitors and he wanted to thank the President of Iraq for sending them at such a crucial time when democracy had been overthrown in Australia. [More…]

• I make the point that the strength of a democracy is surely that the state will remain the servant and not the master of the people. [More…]

• All of those matters, and many others, are quite important to the development of a system of real democracy in this country. [More…]

• We are people who believe in the principles of real democracy, not the half baked system which I suggest Australia has at the present time. [More…]

• After all, we have compulsory voting in Australia and, in the best traditions of democracy, it is assumed that every Australian over the age of 1 8 has listened to the political debate that has taken place over an election period, has assessed the political issues and has made a selection, on an alternative basis, of his choice of candidates. [More…]

• There is much more to be done before we as a nation can rightly say that real democracy exists in Australia. [More…]

• The Government places the very highest priority on bringing some long overdue representative democracy into the trade union movement. [More…]

• The Government believes that, by introducing a system which will apply uniformly to employee and employer organisations and under which a ballot will be conducted by the Electoral Office so that every unionist will have the opportunity to vote, there will be the opportunity for representative democracy in union affairs. [More…]

• I also wonder why it is that members of the Australian Labor Party are so concerned about the efforts of the present Government to give an industrial representative democracy to members of trade unions. [More…]

• What attitude did members of the previous Government take to the Baltic States- an end to freedom; an end to democracy; an end to selfdetermination. [More…]

• Do we live in a democracy in which the people elect the government or is it sufficient for Mr Rupert Murdoch to decide which Party will form the government by giving $64,000 to the Labor Party in 1 972 when it became the government and by not giving that amount to it in 1975 but giving a greater amount to the Liberal Party of Australia? [More…]

• It can be seen that on every occasion when there was a threat to the Establishment we have had some semi-military organisations formed, to use force if necessary, to stop the continuation of the progress of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• But we do raise doubts about the underlying philosophy that $5 in the pocket is more important than community services which a government can provide in the context of a modern democracy in the late 1970s. [More…]

• We will also seek to further our own deeply held values of democracy, freedom and respect for the individual at every opportunity. [More…]

• This man encouraged the invasion of a country which, for the first time in its contemporary history- since 25 April 1974- had the opportunity to enjoy some of the fruits of democracy and self-determination and to run its own affairs free of the colonial overlord that had held sway in the region for some 400 years. [More…]

• Rights as expounded by the Institute for Economic Democracy. [More…]

• Obviously the union ballots is related to the question of democracy in unions. [More…]

• In regard to the collegiate system I make the general observation that it seems to me only reasonable that in order properly to obtain democracy in unions there should be only one tier between the individual member of a union and the final election to Federal leadership. [More…]

• They are arguments based on rank and file control and democracy and also on federalism. [More…]

• Information disseminated on persecution for convictions, the breaches of human rights and on the truthful character of the Soviet democracy on the whole, which continuously is directed towards public opinion by the members of the movement for civil rights in the U.S.S.R., has, it seems, begun to reach the awareness of wide groups of the Western society, and has even shown influence on the tactics applied by some Western political parties.. [More…]

• But when a demonstration develops into a situation where the demonstrators attempt to take away the right of people to speak to others, to have access to public places- the campuses are public places- and to address people of different political views or different attitudes, democracy is imperilled. [More…]

• Democracy ought not to be imperilled by those actions. [More…]

• I think the committee system is pure democracy. [More…]

• It is time the Opposition realised that, unless we in Australia have voted out socialism once and for all and have shown that our country has full confidence in democracy, the people of Australia will lose the freedom they have taken for granted for so long. [More…]

• Let us realise that it is only in a democracy that free trade unions exist. [More…]

• Democratic socialism is the euphoric passing state from democracy to socialism. [More…]

• They also realise that the right of a union to strike is the prerogative of a free trade union movement in a democracy, not that of a socialist country. [More…]

• For again within a democracy citizens are entitled to demonstrate to show their disapproval of any government action or person. [More…]

• Demonstrations like the one we saw last Monday against the elected Prime Minister of the country where, according to the newspapers there were 1000 demonstrators- the nucleus from outside the University- where violence of the type reported occurred; where a brick was thrown through the glass doors causing flying glass to hit the face of Sergeant Barry Carpenter; where Mr Fraser ‘s Assistant Press Secretary was kicked; where Mr Fraser was spat upon and his car kicked and thumped yet no arrests were made, are no longer the prerogative of any person living in a democracy. [More…]

• They have lost their democracy through lethargy. [More…]

• I had pointed out that only in a free democracy were demonstrations considered a right of the people; only in a free democracy were trade union strikes considered a right. [More…]

• After ail, the private sector is a traditional area in a free enterprise democracy, and that is what Australia has been throughout its history. [More…]

• So there is a recognition that if we are to have democracy we must have the associations and the organisations that can influence the daily lives of our people. [More…]

• Democratic socialism is the euphoric passing state from democracy to socialism. [More…]

• Social democratic parties stand as protectors of democracy and civil liberties. [More…]

• As was explained to me in West Germany, nowhere is the importance of social democrats to the continued viability of parliamentary democracy more in evidence than in Portugal today. [More…]

• The Portuguese Socialist Party can rightly claim to have safeguarded the fragile democracy which only recently emerged after 50 years of fascism in that country. [More…]

• Those countries where democracy is strongest are countries in which fraternal parties of the Australian Labor Party, parties affiliated with the socialist internationale, are either in government or have been in government for very long periods. [More…]

• Those are all countries in which democracy is strongest. [More…]

• If the Government wants to turn back the clock and to say that that no longer is to be the case and that it will be the law of the jungle once again, Australia will be placed in the same sort of situation as that which produced the upheaval which destroyed democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. [More…]

• What destroyed democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was the unemployment and the deprivation which the great masses of the people were suffering. [More…]

• Democracy can function only when there is not a significant number of people who are living in the sort of poverty in which they will be living if this Government continues its present policies. [More…]

• They will hammer another nail in the coffin of Australian democracy, which already has been badly damaged by the disgraceful events that occurred last year in this Parliament and elsewhere. [More…]

• It is believed that this is one of the healthy signs of democracy in this country. [More…]

• The Minister will be aware of statements made by the GovernorGeneral, Sir John Kerr, at the annual congress of the Returned Services League earlier this week to the effect that certain forces were trying to destroy notions of freedom and democracy among the young and were campaigning to convert students to political ideologies that ran against our traditional system of freedom and democracy. [More…]

• There are forces at work in society today aimed directly at young people, which are calculated to influence in a fashion adverse to our traditional system of freedom and democracy, and adverse to our normal methods of democratic discussion. [More…]

• The whole purpose of Parliament is to express the views of society in terms of a free democracy in which people can come together in freedom of association and freedom of expression, without any fear of intimidation. [More…]

• In a democracy there is an important right to protest and to demonstrate an alternative point of view. [More…]

• That must be fundamental in a democracy. [More…]

• In a world in which violence, intimidation, tyranny and torture are growing each day and in which democracy is shrinking, we do not need people inciting violence; we need a bipartisan approach in this Senate and in another place to support these principles to our back teeth. [More…]

• The Medibank scheme introduced by this Governmentthis competent Government- gives the Australian community freedom of choice which I am sure to all Australians is the basis of democracy. [More…]

• This is the corruption of democracy. [More…]

• It is the Labor Party and its selective attempt to judge history that corrupts democracy. [More…]

• It is frightening in this democracy of Australia, or so-called democracy of Australia, that a Minister of the Crown can use the privileges of this Parliament to smear and vilify a very great Australian. [More…]

• What is tragic about India is that the tendency is away from parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. [More…]

• India, this great country, has been the example which democrats throughout the world have been able to quote to those who have said that it is only a few rich people in Sweden, New Zealand, Canada or Switzerland who can afford to have the parliamentary democratic system and that as long as there are real economic and communal difficulties democracy does not work. [More…]

• In the past year, since 26 June 1975 when the emergency was proclaimed by the Indian Government, I believe it is becoming increasingly the case that one can no longer make the same boast about Indian democracy that one could make previously. [More…]

• I believe that this action in itself has assisted in the undermining of democracy in India. [More…]

• As has been seen in other countries, once you start off on the road of taking away the constitutional rights of people by whittling down democracy it is usually an unending process. [More…]

• It goes on and on until there is no democracy left at all. [More…]

• I am not suggesting that we should engage in violent abuse of India, but I believe that members of this Parliament, by whatever means they have available, should make it clear to the Indian Government and its representatives that we are disturbed about what is happening there; that we are alarmed by the fact that democracy appears to be in the process of being destroyed in India. [More…]

• I recall discussing with the head of Amnesty International only a few weeks ago while I was in the Soviet Union the situation in which people who believe in democracy in that country found themselves. [More…]

• I think it is important that those of us who live in a part of the world where democracy continues should be making a lot of noiseconstructive noise- and getting in touch with India and other countries in which this retreat from democracy is taking place. [More…]

• I hope that we will be quite active in our fight for democracy in India. [More…]

• During the past 10 years or so I believe the role of the Parliament has been substantially lifted by the Senate, in the Australian parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I think all honourable senators would applaud that aim because that is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• In a democracy which respects the rights of individuals and the rule of law it is vital that there should be no suggestion that political pressures can be used to influence the conduct of the police. [More…]

• Political control of the Police is quite incompatible with our type of democracy. [More…]

• That we believe one of the essential freedoms which contribute to genuine democracy is freedom of access to information. [More…]

• I believe this gross injustice to democracy when we have to pay to be heard and regardless of the Warden’s decision the Mines Minister reads the case after his decision has apparently been made. [More…]

• However, I would just like to say that it is usual for Senator Keeffe and other Queensland Labor senators in debates on matters involving the Queensland Government to make snide references to the Premier, some of the ministers or some of the Liberal Party and National Party members of the Parliament and suggest that there is now a lack of democracy or freedom or something or other in Queensland. [More…]

• Let me conclude this part of my speech by saying that democracy in Queensland seems to be operating very vigorously indeed and this was particularly evident in an election held not long ago when the Labor Party was decimated. [More…]

• But again the forces of right prevailed and democracy was preserved. [More…]

• In a democracy people have liberty and freedom but freedom brings with it responsibility. [More…]

• I repeat what the Minister said because I think it is of fundamental importance that the people of Australia and honourable senators on the other side of the chamber understand that the spurious attempts by the trade unions to fine people for legitimately offering themselves to an employer for work is a complete negation of the principles of democracy and civil liberty. [More…]

• This is a dangerous situation in any democracy. [More…]

• As you will appreciate, Mr President, it is necessary to preface my submissions by making an appeal for the reintroduction of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I sat on a Committee for a few months with some very capable parliamentarians- representative Dr Harry Jenkins and Sir Magnus Cormack, among others- and we got a massive report about parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Even Mr Speaker Snedden has referred to the need for parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• People who may not always have a high opinion of the concept of parliamentary democracy said to me in relation to that subject: ‘At least you got an answer, Senator’. [More…]

• That is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• For a brief 2 weeks it looked as though democracy would come to the people of [More…]

• Surely this represents a grave threat to democracy when law abiding citizens are given no area for discussion excepting in a court of law at which they have to pay their costs, only to be denied their rights to hear the Magistrate ‘s decision. [More…]

• It is something of a cliche in democracy to say that people should have equality under the law. [More…]

• Unfortunately this cliche was not realised in this democracy until the Whitlam Government took steps to realise it by setting up the Australian Legal Aid Office in 1973. [More…]

• It is well known that that is why the present Government was not prepared to let democracy prevail and put those Bills to a vote. [More…]

• I suggest that the authorities who have analysed the situation from a constitutional point of view, such as Professor O ‘Connell, Dr Forcey and Professor Richardson, citing such authorities as Mr Justice Dixon for the right of the Senate to reject Bills with a consequent dissolution of the Parliament, bring home to the people of Australia how useful it is in this democracy to have a mechanism in the Senate with the power to reject a money Bill such as this. [More…]

• They say that whatever we decide on this side of the House is a political decision, as though that was not a political decision to strike a very serious blow at parliamentary democracy in this country to create in the minds of a lot of people, after years of propaganda by those who might have had revolutionary concepts, a lack of faith in the parliamentary processes. [More…]

• If the Executive Government of any nation is all, there is no democracy, there is a dictatorship. [More…]

• I refer to 2 meetings to be held in Adelaide next week- one at the Adelaide Town Hall and the other at the Norwood Town Hall- on the subject of last year’s constitutional crisis and democracy in Australia. [More…]

• Is it to be conducted by the tribunal which is to be established or is it to be an independent public inquiry as it would be in any other democracy comparable to this? [More…]

• The Bill has been introduced both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, accompanied by a great deal of noisy rhetoric about the desirability of having democracy in trade unions. [More…]

• The secret ballot legislation which was introduced in June of this year, poorly drawn up as it was, was put forward as another example of the Government’s intention and concern to introduce a greater degree of democracy into the affairs of trade unions. [More…]

• I share the Minister’s view about the desirability of the highest level of democracy in trade unions. [More…]

• I agree that there should be democracy in trade unions to the utmost possible degree. [More…]

• When we talk about democracy in trade unions I think it is very important that we should try to put a little substance in to the rhetoric, a little flesh on the bones of the Minister’s second reading speech. [More…]

• The present Prime Minister (Mr Fraser) who was then the Liberal Party spokesman on industrial relations, acknowledged the commitment to industrial democracy which was in our 1973 legislation. [More…]

• So much for union democracy. [More…]

• Thirdly, the Government’s action in ensuring that such a system is retained reveals the emptiness of its commitment to internal trade union democracy. [More…]

• The Government’s commitment to industrial democracy as shown by this legislation is nothing more than a sham. [More…]

• He referred as being empty rhetoric references to democracy, to the minority interests, to the involvement of the mass of the people in the establishment of those who represent them, whether it be in a union, some other organisation or association or in the Parliament itself. [More…]

• Perhaps he had forgotten involvement that he has expressed from time to time with the principles of democracy. [More…]

• Senator Button suggested later when he approved of democracy and the methods and philosophy of democracy that management should reflect the rank and file views. [More…]

• That is the very essence of democracy. [More…]

• The difficult proposition is to answer that question, to find the best method by which a measure of real democracy can be called upon to result in the election of those people whom the great mass of the unionists require to lead them. [More…]

• I seem to think, as I look at this legislation and as I listen to the opposition to it from the Australian Labor Party in the chamber tonight, that it highlights a problem which I believe is basic to the problems which confront Australians and certainly to the problems that confront parliamentary democracy in this country. [More…]

• I might say in reference to those thoughts that probably the American circumstance fills considerable numbers of Australians with a measure of envy, for it does appear that there is not the sort of vast ideological gap between the major political entities in that democracy. [More…]

• The Cameron legislation in 1973 contained two very substantial measures of progress towards full democracy in the trade union movement. [More…]

• Both of these measures constituted major progress in increasing democracy in the unions but in its union bashing campaign in 1975 and 1976 the coalition chose to deceive the public about the effects of the Cameron legislation. [More…]

• Indeed the media together with the coalition parties succeeded in confusing the general public who I think did come to believe that there was no provision for rank and file voting in union rules and that the Cameron legislation had not made any progress towards democracy in trade unions. [More…]

• I think it is worth drawing the attention of honourable senators and any other people who may be listening to this debate to the numerous undertakings given by coalition spokespersons to establish democracy in the unions. [More…]

• Events over recent years have emphasised the very basis of trade union democracy is under threat. [More…]

• I shall not continue with these quotations, although I could continue for quite a long time as these promises were made so often; but I ask honourable senators to note that in the promises made by the Prime Minister and by Mr Street there is an emphasis on postal voting as being the essential element in introducing democracy into the unions. [More…]

• It seems to be suggested that postal voting is more important even than rank and file voting in order to ensure democracy. [More…]

• For months the Government talked about the importance of establishing postal ballots and how democracy would be achieved by imposing postal ballots on the unions. [More…]

• The point I hope I am making clearly- I think there was some confusion about this in the debate last night- is that by allowing for the collegiate system to be perpetuated the Government also is allowing unions not to have postal ballots; that is, not to have the very system which the Government claimed was essential for democracy. [More…]

• I think it is an entirely spurious claim by the Minister, and by anyone else who makes such a claim, that somehow the collegiate system ensures more democracy than the rank and file system. [More…]

• Most of all, we in the Opposition oppose this legislation because it is a complete reversal of all the undertakings given by members of the coalition parties during 1975 and 1976 about introducing democracy into trade unions. [More…]

• But this is still not good for democracy. [More…]

• I wish to incorporate in Hansard a chart which shows the prostitution of trade union democracy in relation to the intervention in the Federated Clerks Union. [More…]

• In order to promote democracy in the unions. [More…]

• Let us hear what this great promoter of democracy in unions has to say about the rank and file. [More…]

• Now we see democracy. [More…]

• Now we talk about democracy. [More…]

• Under the guise of democracy the amendments to the Act were moved by Mr Clyde Cameron in 1973. [More…]

• But let us analyse whether or not one system or the other gives true democracy. [More…]

• One might ask: How is democracy to be upheld in the trade union movement in those circumstances? [More…]

• But what did this great democrat of a Minister in the previous Government do to that principle of democracy? [More…]

• Here is the action of this person who was quite determined to get, according to his words, democracy back into the trade union movement. [More…]

• It is his sort of democracy and the sort of democracy of his political friends that he is seeking; not the democracy that the trade union movement has known and has fought for over the years. [More…]

• That would be true democracy, not something imposed upon the union by the Court. [More…]

• To give you some examples of how this National Civic Council-dominated college denigrates democracy, I would set out the following facts - [More…]

• There is an example of the democracy that exists in this Union. [More…]

• Clyde Cameron, whatever his weaknesses and however he got on with his Leader, nevertheless tried to get democracy in trade unions because its absence was one of his peculiar aversions. [More…]

• Senator Harradine referred to the Bill before the Senate as setting up a more democratic system that will provide a choice for organisations and give more democracy to the rank and file members particularly of the small branches of unions. [More…]

• This, to me, is the personification of democracy. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite have spoken at length today about industrial democracy. [More…]

• Where is this great democracy and rank and file participation in the election of the officials of a union that Senator Hall is talking about? [More…]

• If that is democracy, I am completely mistaken. [More…]

• The wartime objective of survival, following the ‘whatever may be ‘ philosophy, is different indeed from the objective in peacetime which is, in a democracy, to implement legislation which takes account of human nature. [More…]

• I remarked earlier- I believe it should not be lost sight of as these matters of centralism and federalism are constantly raised- that there is a tendency in the world today wherever democracy and free communities and free parliaments operate, for there to be an increase in federalist concepts as opposed to the centralist concept. [More…]

• In a democracy it can be irksome if somebody does not want to do something that the Government desires. [More…]

• I predict- I hope I am proved wrong- that next year will see a further shattering of the consensus without which parliamentary democracy cannot be conducted, that is, that there will be a confrontation between this Government and the unions in an attempt to make the unions bear the burden of the Government’s errors. [More…]

• We also know that the Scandinavian countriesoften regarded as the garden lands of democracy- have had an ombudsman for a long time. [More…]

• He would know that the Committee for Democracy in Greece came before the Committee on which I sat. [More…]

• One cannot talk about democracy or people’s rights or their right to go to law if they are not provided with the means to go to law. [More…]

• I think, as we all believe in democracy and people’s right to go to law, this Government ought to look at that point very seriously to see what can be done about it. [More…]

• I did my national service and, had I been old enough, I would have been willing to fight in any of these circumstances to defend democracy. [More…]

• Kilgariff-he talked about that great place of democracy- that he is one of those who opposed the election of senators for the Northern Territory when the Labor Government proposed it. [More…]

• Senator Kilgariff endeavoured to point out how the Northern Territory had led the way in Aboriginal affairs and how it was the acme of democracy. [More…]

• This is some sort of a triumph for democracy, even in a period when democracy is in grave peril. [More…]

• Therefore, I support the amendment moved by my colleague Senator Button which opposes this legislation and proposes to send it back for redrafting after a period of time for proper public inquiry and discussion so that the Government will then come up with legislation which will restructure public broadcasting in the interests of democracy, the Australian consumer and all the people involved in the industry. [More…]

• I have invited the individual universities to look to their by-laws to ensure that they contain full democratic provisions to enable students to conduct their affairs with full democracy and I have suggested that, if some practice is obnoxious, the universities might see whether some kind of opting out can be made available as there is in some trade unions. [More…]

• In this development of parliamentary law we were most advantaged by the fact that in the United States of America, that great federal democracy, the constitution of whose Senate might be looked for more than this item of current events, the Senate of the United States and the courts of the United States have had to deal with the problem of transcendent invasion of the integrity of government in that state. [More…]

• I always think that it is dangerous to the Parliament, to democracy and to the people when matters are rushed through this place. [More…]

• The Opposition believes in democracy and we want the most democratic system to apply to elections for the Federal House. [More…]

• ‘Democracy’ comes from 2 Greek words which mean the power of the people and, therefore, if we believe in democracy we will elect a government which truly represents the people, and as near as we can we will elect representatives to represent an equal number of people. [More…]

• -They are the laws of an organisation, not the laws which relate to the election of representatives to Parliament in a democracy. [More…]

• That was pure democracy. [More…]

• If we depart from the system to avoid the creation of hardship we will depart from the principle of true representation of the people and will destroy democracy. [More…]

• Labor opposes this provision because it represents a destruction of the true meaning of democracy- the representation of equal numbers of people. [More…]

• That is the famous Senator Missen talking about democracy now. [More…]

• The linchpin of democracy is electoral justice and without a delicately and fairly balanced electoral system there cannot be real democracy. [More…]

• The Labor Party constantly has advocated reform of Australian electoral laws in order to bring about real democracy in Australia in the strict literal sense. [More…]

• The principal job to be carried out in this redistribution so far as the Labor Party is concerned is to ensure real democracy by the provision of just, reasonable and sensible electoral boundaries. [More…]

• That principle should be an essential ingredient in any restoration of confidence in the system of parliamentary democracy and parliamentary government. [More…]

• This is democracy. [More…]

• We are doing our best with this legislation to make sure that democracy works. [More…]

• The fragmentation of parties under the voting systems of those countries grossly weakened democracy. [More…]

• Anybody who has any idea of democracy would be horribly frightened of what the consequences might be if, as the result of procrastination, people in a State voted for their representatives in that State at large. [More…]

• A by-product of that situation would be that people would have a much lower appreciation of Parliament and would ask: Is the concept of parliamentary democracy worthwhile? [More…]

• It would just about end democracy in this country if we had to try to persuade people to vote for- I use New South Wales as an example- about 45 members from 300 candidates. [More…]

• In a democracy the people who suffer most are the minorities and we can reach a situation where they have no say whatsoever. [More…]

• However, there has always been the proposition that in a democracy we cater for minorities. [More…]

• In a democracy you will be all right if you are in the majority but you will not be if you are in the minority. [More…]

• The dictionary meaning of the word ‘democracy’ usually mentions in part that it is based on the equality of man. [More…]

• I suppose that it is fair enough for us to talk in a parliamentary democracy of the equality of representation rather than the equality of voting power. [More…]

• The Australian Labor Party supports this Bill, as it supported it several years ago, on these bases, and I would like the dissidents to listen to this: If simultaneous elections for both Houses constitute some sort of a threat to the democratic process and to the Senate, why did not democracy perish and the Senate wither on the vine in the first 60 years of our federation when elections always were held simultaneously? [More…]

• I submit that the greatest threat to democracy in Australia is the apathy and the inertia of a large section of this very conservative country. [More…]

• If we can devote more time to this debate it will be beneficial to democracy in the long run. [More…]

• In our system we have a people’s house elected by the people and I think it is an essential requirement of democracy but it can be turned out of office, sacked at will every 6 months by a State appointed house in this smaller chamber, the Senate. [More…]

• If that time ever comes the matter will have to be decided by some method and we will have a fight between democracy and the establishment. [More…]

• Democracy, as we knew it before and as it had survived, is gone. [More…]

• It is really to argue for the destruction of democracy. [More…]

• If you do not have elections, you do not have democracy. [More…]

• The essence of democracy is that the power which resides at present in the 2 Houses of this Parliament should be reviewed as frequently as possible and as desirable so that the people in Australia can sit in judgment. [More…]

• We should remember that the introduction of pensions, workmen’s compensation, universal franchise and democracy itself were all opposed by the sorts of people who are opposing this sensible and proper amendment to the Constitution. [More…]

• It is not being introduced because of a desire to improve democracy in this country or for any other reason. [More…]

• But no matter what devious means the Prime Minister and his desperate colleagues have for proposing this and the other amendments to the Constitution now, the Labor Party has always believed- it has been in our platform and we stated this in 1974- that the long term results of this and the other proposals will be a more stable political democracy in this country. [More…]

• Governments in Australia already have the shortest term of office of governments in any western democracy as they are elected for 3 years only. [More…]

• We heard from Senator Wright and other honourable senators on his side that the Senate is essential to democracy in this country, that the written constitution is essential to democracy in this country and that the States are essential to our democracy also. [More…]

• No one in this place is seriously telling us that that is not a democracy. [More…]

• In the time allotted to me in this debate I want to say a few words about democracy in Australia. [More…]

• It is useful to underline the principles of parliamentary democracy and democracy in Australia as we know them. [More…]

• To pass premature judgment before the people have had an opportunity to express their views is, I think, not in the best interests of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I believe that if that process continued democracy in Australia would be harmed because elections would not have the same impact. [More…]

• They are not impressed by people who take an unrealistic view about the things which are really a threat to democracy. [More…]

• The real threat to democracy is when Australians become subject to emotion and not reason, and I hope that in the months that precede the vote on these referendums there will be an unemotional and reasonable approach to the problems which confront the people over their most important constitution. [More…]

• There is in this country another very great danger to democracy, and I mention this only because Senator James McClelland indicated his great fear for democracy here. [More…]

• In my view another enormous threat to democracy lies in the extraordinary and large emotional ideological gap which separates Australians and we of this chamber must do all we can, inside and outside it, to lessen that gap and to lessen the use of emotion in place of reason. [More…]

• -Every speaker in the debate tonight and earlier today has used the catchcry ‘the protectors of democracy’. [More…]

• It is not good for democracy. [More…]

• Had they been accepted they would have decayed democracy, not strengthened it. [More…]

• Putting questions to the people for determination is of the very essence of democracy in a world where currently in the United Nations there are only 24 democracies amongst 146 represented nations, the remainder of which are either despotisms or totalitarian states. [More…]

• Democracy is very precious to us. [More…]

• I have great confidence that the Australian people will do no damage to our democracy by their votes in the forthcoming referenda. [More…]

• Without Senate independence the casualty would be democracy. [More…]

• Without Senate independence the casualty would be democracy. [More…]

• I believe that its importance to the Constitution, to the democracy of Australia, is very great. [More…]

• That No case was prepared by the Liberal and National Country Parties which now are asking the people to do a total about-face- a 180 degree about-turn- and to support a piece of legislation which in 1 974 was described as deceitful and as a threat to democracy. [More…]

• In 1974 it was said to be a threat to democracy. [More…]

• We consider the referenda to be important to the people and to our concept of democracy. [More…]

• The passage of this referendum will be good for democracy in Australia. [More…]

• It will contribute to the better functioning of democracy and will help to ensure that people remain in favour of democracy in this country and not opposed to it. [More…]

• It put forward a series of referendums which seemed to be aimed at the whole pattern of Australian democracy. [More…]

• I would like to take up the theme that has been emphasised by a number of honourable senators I think that Senator Wriedt was the most recent to refer to it in this debate and that Senator Tehan was probably the first to refer to itthat is, that the sovereign power in the Australian democracy is the people themselves. [More…]

• But ultimately parliamentary democracy in Australia in 1975 was a victim of the lack of this legislation. [More…]

• It has always been my belief that the maintenance of the family as a basic unit of society is essential to our way of life in our Australian democracy. [More…]

• The statistics which I have quoted in some detail are all the more alarming when we look at them in terms of preserving the family unit as basic to the welfare of our democracy. [More…]

• In my opinion, it seized power by means of fraud, and the Senate might recall that when I spoke at that time I said that I believed parliamentary democracy was imperilled by the actions of Liberals in this place in refusing Supply to Labor. [More…]

• The passage of this referendum will be good for democracy in Australia. [More…]

• That is the evidence of democracy. [More…]

• We in this part of the world, in a democracy which has been in existence now for nearly 1 50 years and with the experience we have gained, must set some examples. [More…]

• We must show other and newer countries that it is possible to maintain a democracy and to have full expression of human rights. [More…]

• If this is democracy, then it is no wonder that our Government has been swept back into power after only 3 years of socialist paradise! [More…]

• I think that Anthony Crosland was one of the foremost thinkers and writers in the world on social democracy. [More…]

• Of course, her visit has stimulated argument about democracy, republicanism and so on. [More…]

• They said that the proposed change was a ‘threat to democracy’. [More…]

• Without Senate independence the casualty would be democracy. [More…]

• I always have believed that this Parliament is the focal point of this democracy and therefore the higher the standard of this Parliament the better is the democratic standard of the people. [More…]

• I think the Government is doing a very serious injustice to itself, to the Constitution and to our democracy by trotting out such somersaulting statements on these questions. [More…]

• Do honourable senators think that this is the right type of thing to happen in a democracy? [More…]

• I always think that the safest democracy of all is a democracy in which the most power remains in the hands of the people so that when they vote they have the right to say who they will have. [More…]

• I sincerely hope that the words which I have spoken will at least be considered by some people and that on 15 May the Government will get its reply from the people, that is a good solid ‘No thank you, we want to remain as we are, a safe, sound democracy’. [More…]

• If the Industrial Relations Bureau is able to impose some semblance of order in a field where, too often, the rule of law plays no part at all, then I for one will welcome it as a strengthening of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• It was because the Soviet Union was supporting them and the western countries, which talk about democracy, were not supporting them. [More…]

• He pointed out that he had no alternative, if he were to take part in the struggle for Portuguese democracy, but to accept whatever assistance he could get and not say: ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if the Americans or the British would help us? [More…]

• If we find when that conflagration takes place that the Soviet Union has always been the friend of the Africans and that those people who talk about democracy have been the friends of the Nazis, that will damage us very severely where it hurts us most. [More…]

• If we believe the democracy is a system which ought to be defended -400 Australians were killed in Vietnam, allegedly in defence of democracy- we should say that it is not something which ought to be thought of only when a war is actually started, but is also a policy which ought to be actively pursued at all times. [More…]

• The people of India over the last few days have given one of the greatest affirmations of the strength of democracy that has been given anywhere in the world. [More…]

• Mrs Han Suyin writes articles one day saying how Madam Chiang Ching is bringing about a new type of socialism and democracy because she is a guide of the cultural revolution and then a week later she writes in Scope that this is in fact not the case and that Madam Chiang Ching and 3 others were all members of the Gang of Four who were plotting to restore capitalism. [More…]

• I certainly agree with him that it was a victory for democracy. [More…]

• When we came back from that visit I think all of us had the impression that democracy in India was on the decline. [More…]

• Regardless of whether one supports Fernandes or the Congress Party the election result is certainly a great turnaround from the position we saw in India and a great victory for democracy not only in that part of Asia but throughout the world. [More…]

• I endorse what Senator Sibraa has said about the victory of democracy which we have seen in the last few days in the Indian subcontinent. [More…]

• But we must ask ourselves in all reality in 1977 whether we can afford to have a song and words like that as a national song in a country with pretensions to being a modern political democracy. [More…]

• Surely part of living in a democracy is being able to criticise governments or criticise people in a constructive manner. [More…]

• It is healthy that in a democracy this happens. [More…]

• It is an expression of political democracy. [More…]

• What concerns me in association with this kind of activity in Australia is that I believe it is not consistent with the preservation in the long run of representative democracy in the style that we support. [More…]

• Certainly, I do not think anybody here would want to condemn the members of the Eagle Squadron, the American volunteers, who enlisted in the fight for democracy against fascism in the Second World War. [More…]

• This last is most important; genuine democracy is impossible without a well-informed electorate. [More…]

• This last is most important; genuine democracy is impossible without a well-informed electorate. [More…]

• Although that is somewhat derided I make the point that unless profits rise in a reasonable and proper manner it does not matter what sort of society a person lives in, whether a fascist dictatorship, a communist dictatorship, a socialist Utopia- wherever one finds that- or the hardest of all institutions, a democracy, as we have in this country. [More…]

• What are we doing for other institutions in those countries to foster the ideals of grass roots democracy? [More…]

• When Australia commits itself - whether it be to the Asian Development Fund or to its predecessor, the World Bank- and we cast our bread on these particular waters does it mean, in effect, that money unwittingly can be used to prop up a regime that we would hardly regard as a democracy or a country in which there is brotherhood and unity amongst the citizens of that country? [More…]

• I make it perfectly clear to honourable senators that the primary responsibility for democracy and the execution of an action of conscience on any campus is that of the governing body- the senate or the council of the university. [More…]

• People complained that the Whitlam Government ran a centralist government, but it was an open democracy compared with what this Government is doing. [More…]

• In a democracy- and sometimes that word can be put in inverted commas- it is very difficult to marshal and determine priorities. [More…]

• And since parliamentary democracy is-and can only be by definition (rather like what I was taught in the [More…]

• Virtually every western industrial democracy has some form of public funding for political party campaigning and/or administration of the party. [More…]

• It has been in the forefront of democracy in Australia. [More…]

• This is not a suitable method of government in a democracy like ours. [More…]

• In 1959 Senator Wright saw that it was necessary in the interests of the good government of this country if it was to develop as a viable political democracy, if its economy was to develop, to have changes to the industrial powers of the Commonwealth; he saw that there would have to be changes to the broadcasting powers, to the corporations powers, to the marketing powers of the Commonwealth Government; he saw that the Commonwealth Government should have power over interest rates; he saw that there should be alterations to the provisions of section 92 of the Constitution. [More…]

• I think that each and everyone of us, instead of tearing down the Senate with criticism, ought to try to build it into a very strong section of the democracy of this country. [More…]

• I think that honourable senators individually and collectively can do more to make this institution a really strong section ofthe democracy of this country. [More…]

• That is how it should be in the interests of democracy and in the interests of the stability of this institution. [More…]

• They fooled the people into voting No in 3 States; yet they come in here and say they believe in democracy. [More…]

• I believe that Australian democracy and the functioning of our democratic system has suffered a loss in Mr Barnes’ death. [More…]

• It is fair that we who tend from time to time to be critical of those whose duty it is to analyse critically our actions should pay tribute to people who by their professionalism have added, as honourable senators have said, to the strength of democracy and to its greater working in Australia. [More…]

• The Government, concerned as the honourable senator obviously is concerned with this situation, has asked the institutions to look to their rules and ordinances to see whether they are discharging their functions properly and to see whether students can be helped into a full democracy. [More…]

• 1 ) Did any news bulletins on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, or any other public affairs program of the Commission, use news coverage or comment in relation to a large public meeting held in the Sydney Town Hall on Tuesday, 8 March 1 977, organised by the Citizens for Democracy and entitled “Towards an Australian Republic’. [More…]

• It seems to me that it is somewhat naive to assume that any relationship in a free democracy can operate without being subject to some sort of consequences. [More…]

• No one in a free democracy could assume that this is a circumstance that must be allowed to continue. [More…]

• Indeed, responsibility is the very hallmark of a democracy and responsibility is the very essence of the legislation that is before us in this Parliament this afternoon. [More…]

• I suggest to them that if they study the position in any western democracy, they will see that attempts to bring into being such statutes have always failed. [More…]

• I suppose it could be said this is industrial democracy. [More…]

• It was described by the other side of politics not only as socialistic but also as communistic and the beginning of the end of democracy, free expression of views and, of course, free enterprise in Australia. [More…]

• I pay tribute, as does my son, to the Labor clubs on the campuses which are determined to bring true democracy onto the campuses. [More…]

• One thing that we have in common in this place is a desire to see decent democracy in this country and to see decent elections so that people elected to office really represent the groups whom they allege they represent. [More…]

• Such a distortion of the legislative process is neither reassuring about the state of parliamentary democracy in this country nor a good augury of the practicality of the Bill itself. [More…]

• I believe that it is people of this character who contribute in a great way to the democracy that should live on in both Houses of Parliament. [More…]

• With the transference from fascism to democracy, I do not envy the leaders in Portugal. [More…]

• Having identified them, they have to make a determination that they are going to solve them, because in a democracy any legislation is about as good as the strength of the will of the people to make it work. [More…]

• That is a negation of democracy. [More…]

• Tonight is a very sad night for democracy in this country. [More…]

• I think we are a responsible organisation and, as was told to us in November 1975, we have a responsibility to democracy and a responsibility for the democratic process. [More…]

• Those who are preaching that democracy is on the verge of collapse and allowing the dictatorships of the industrial world and the Arab world to take over will see in this behaviour of the Senate today a demonstration that Parliament is capable of acting promptly when effective action is required. [More…]

• I am aware that, as one would expect in any democracy, there is constant discussion about a revision of both the Australian and the American provisions to which I have referred. [More…]

• That epitomises to me political democracy. [More…]

• I think that is a very important aspect of Australian democracy because, after all, local government or the third tier of government, is at the grass roots level of the people. [More…]

• There are others, of course, such as students of democracy and the development of political systems, who believe that communities ought to be involved and ought to have a responsiblity for the running of their own affairs even if, in fact, that has to be brought about compulsorily, as would be the situation with an elected assembly carrying out municipal and state type functions. [More…]

• They are facing the kinds of challenges that from time to time democracy in itself faces. [More…]

• Democracy is very vulnerable to organised force. [More…]

• I believe that democracy in this as in other matters will win out. [More…]

• That sort of determination by a major trade union movement in a great democracy would be, I think, in some measure embarrassing to the Labor Opposition in this country and it would be something that Labor would not want people to be thinking about and discussing. [More…]

• He also happens to be head of the Workers Democracy Unit in the State Government in South Australia, as is well known, and consequently he advises the Premier of that State. [More…]

• This time that something new is not a new world economic order but a new order where no nation can plunder any other and where ethnic democracy is the new order and each group of people runs its own affairs. [More…]

• The internal solution of the problem of political representation to which Mr Smith has been referring will, I feel sure, wind up with the concept of ethnic democracy, which I mentioned previously, where the Matabele run their affairs, the Mashona run theirs and the whites run theirs. [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite may say that one of the great problems in a Western democracy is that it pays little more than lip service to the concepts of selfdetermination. [More…]

• We have to recognise, defend and promote those things that are basic to the society which we have evolved in Australia, the basic cornerstones of a free democracy. [More…]

• A great deal of information has been provided to members of Parliament and I am quite sure that we are all aware of the SOTUFD-the Sixth October Thai United Front For Democracy- campaign in Victoria that was started some time ago in an endeavour to bring to the attention both of members of parliament and of parliament themselves that an injustice is being done to a number of people. [More…]

• I think these are reasonable requests when one takes into account that a country that was practising democracy for some years finds itself in the position where democracy is overthrown with no possibility of having it restored in the near future. [More…]

• I therefore join with Senator Coleman in saying that I believe that these factors should be very seriously considered by the people of Australia and that we should raise our voices where we can to try to ensure that the people in that country have the proper right of trial even if we cannot do very much about their democracy at the present time. [More…]

• So, Britain’s ‘Socialist Generation’, having wreaked so much havoc at home by its passion for levelling, its search for power and by its upper class guilt, ends up by blurring the historical distinction between social democracy and marxism. [More…]

• The centrality of this impulse and the incapacity of US technological and material superiority to determine the outcome of the Vietnam war stimulated a deep probing of the theory and practice of democracy ‘ in the imperialist heartlands. [More…]

• It is a right which is particularly needed in Queensland where the gerrymander is alive and well, and where representative democracy is sorely wounded. [More…]

• To me that is a travesty of justice, a travesty of democracy, which leads to the very thing about which churchmen in Queensland are protesting. [More…]

• I draw the attention of the Senate to two speeches that Senator Wheeldon made in the last year, one on India and the loss of democracy there, and one on the Middle East. [More…]

• Those who are preaching that democracy is on the verge of collapse and allowing the dictatorships of the industrial world and the Arab world to take over will see in this behaviour of the Senate today a demonstration that Parliament is capable of acting promptly when effective action is required. [More…]

• The fact is that in every Western democracy great account is taken of the trade union movement. [More…]

• How can people who talk about parliamentary democracy argue that that is a good thing? [More…]

• Honourable senators opposite are also against the provisions which provide for democracy in the industrial community by making it an offence to force individuals to join unions. [More…]

• So much for the Government’s brand of democracy. [More…]

• It is not possible to legislate anything in a democracy. [More…]

• If the incidence of strikes is any criterion, then the industrial relations system of almost every Western democracy has broken down. [More…]

• It is not easy in a democracy even to touch a sacred cow, but I do not quarrel with anybody about the question of national security. [More…]

• 1 priority in a democracy; but that is all they have. [More…]

• In every other country of equivalent sophistication and pretentions to democracy the national broadcasting service is always referred to as the state broadcasting service and the other broadcasting services, here known as the ‘commercials’, are referred to as the independent broadcasting services. [More…]

• The mark of the sort of vital democracy which we hope to be is the independent and free discussion that takes place both in private and on the air waves in Australia- on television and radio- and which is reflected in the media in a variety of ways. [More…]

• Will the Minister consider making a protest to the South African Government against this further blow to democracy in that country and denials of human rights? [More…]

• I say with great respect to every honourable senator that, if we believe in the institution of Parliament, if we believe in the system of parliamentary democracy, if we believe in the election of people’s representatives to the Parliament, we have to devise and evolve a system whereby as much as possible of the deliberations in this place is recorded and transmitted to the public at large. [More…]

• I am not advocating an adoption of the presidential system but I am adverting to it as a democracy which operates without blasting to instability Government control of finance simply because the Congress takes a defective part in the decision as to finance. [More…]

• I do not think it is terribly destructive of democracy if somebody has to wait for a week or so to know who has won an election. [More…]

• I do not think it was good for democracy when well over 12 per cent of the votes were informal. [More…]

• But if it is ruled that the only alternative to the defeat of certain Bills in this chamber is the resignation of the government, this places the Senate in the position of a superior force over the people of Australia and is a denial of democracy m Australia. [More…]

• He has the right under the Standing Orders, he has the right under convention, and it is one of the fundamental bases of democracy that he should be able to do so. [More…]

• So, when it comes to industrial democracy, I think that the WWF is a pacesetter in that regard. [More…]

• The very basis of democracy is threatened if we have the threat of reprimand hanging over us for the way in which we vote at an election. [More…]

• I suppose that the last bastion of democracy- it is usually classified that way- is the churches. [More…]

• That is an expression which I should imagine has not previously appeared in the legislation of a country with pretentions to being a modern democracy. [More…]

• We in the Opposition believe that the media itself is one of the most important instruments for preserving democracy. [More…]

• We hope that in Australia we still have a democracy to be preserved. [More…]

• It is for this reason that we, both in this chamber and outside it, have stressed constantly the importance of preserving the independence and the objectivity of national broadcasting and of restraining the commercial sector when it acts in a way which is contrary to the public interest and to the interest of democracy. [More…]

• The Minister kept assuring us that our anxiety was totally unjustified because everything would be accessible to the public; that procedures would be established whereby the ultimate expression of democracy could take place, in that the public could come and say, ‘We do not like that station, that kind of broadcasting’, that if enough of them said it, in a democratic way, their wishes would be observed and they would be able to bring about change. [More…]

• It will be a disappointment to everyone who believes that in a democracy all citizens should have access to the air waves. [More…]

• Those of us who have some sensitivity to democracy, as we call it, talk about decisions being taken by Parliament. [More…]

• Nobody today would object to sports scores coming from different places, whether it be Bucharest or a western democracy. [More…]

• The statement concerned the introduction of socalled industrial democracy in South Australia. [More…]

• The Premier, when asked in the State Parliament last year about the objectives of the State Government in this matter, said that there was a list of companies available to the worker participation unit or the worker democracy unit, as it is called, which set out a priority list for pressuring those companies to implement this program over the next few years. [More…]

• One has only to consider for a moment to realise the impact on the minds of potential investors of the mere statement of the Premier yesterday in Melbourne: ‘We will introduce worker democracy in private industry after 1 980 ‘. [More…]

• It is pretty clear that if it establishes an organisation for the economic development of South Australia but at the same time creates another organisation which is in contradistinction thereto, with exactly contrary objectives, such as the worker democracy unit, there will be very little development in South Australia. [More…]

• I believe that most of my colleagues on both sides of the chamber work very hard and that they are in fact desirous of trying to help effectively the operation of democracy in this country. [More…]

• I believe that the attempt by the Labor Party to overthrow parliamentary democracy in Australia, the attempt by the Whitlam Government to rule without Supply and to force the banks to provide the finance to enable the then Government to continue contrary to the democratic process had created a situation where the man with the responsibility for blowing the whistle and letting the people speak had to act. [More…]

• To me the situation in November 1975 was reminiscent of some of the great battles between the Parliament and the Executive in the whole history of the development of parliamentary democracy in the relatively few parts of the world where it exists today. [More…]

• They pillaged the system in so many ways but this was never better demonstrated than by the attempt to hang on to power at a time when the democratic system in a bicameral democracy had reached the stage where the people were entitled to have their say. [More…]

• That is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• The major point I make is that I believe that the whole of the Parliament has a tremendous responsibility at this time to ensure that its procedures are relevant to the day and age in which we live, that they are understood by the public and that they enhance the public attitude towards parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Finally, I refer briefly to the need for this Parliament at all times to engage in a degree of what may be called futurology or what is called by Alvin Tofler anticipatory democracy. [More…]

• They have rightly stated that this cynicism and this suspicion of parliament and parliamentarians is a danger to the institution itself and to democracy itself. [More…]

• As one who believes in parliamentary democracy, I regret that. [More…]

• If we look at Sir Zelman Cowen ‘s career as a lawyer, an academic, a vice chancellor and a commentator on public affairs, we find running right through that career a respect for democracy and for the principles of liberal democracy which I think is something which all members of parliament share with him. [More…]

• I do not believe we can maintain a sensible and good democratic system if people hold the institutions of democracy in contempt. [More…]

• I believe that in a peculiar way this institution is able to meet the problems of present democracy. [More…]

• If we change the way we operate, not by way of confrontation but co-operatively, we will increase our influence, the ability of government to respond to the people and we will have a much healthier functioning democracy and less of the sort of headlines which top George Negus’s column. [More…]

• In full public eye, he accepted the big payoff, more than $70,000 a year plus benefits and the hardships of the post in Paris, a large income by any standards, but surely a cheap reward for dividing his nation, undermining the very fibre of Australian constitutional democracy and degrading the position of Head of State of the Australian Commonwealth. [More…]

• We probably would not in terms of local democracy, but it would be a change to see a different face around the place. [More…]

• I do not think that Australians are so careless of their rights in a democracy that they objected to having to vote again. [More…]

• One cannot get away from the fact that the present leader of the Liberal Party and Opposition in New South Wales was, to say the least, belittling democracy when he went shopping with people who ostensibly were going to give him some inside information. [More…]

• I think it has to be recognised by those who claim to support parliamentary democracy that a very sizeable minority of Australians have lost faith in the Parliament as a place for genuine debate. [More…]

• SPEECH BY THE PREMIER, MR DUNSTAN, AT MT ELIZA STAFF COLLEGE, MELBOURNE, MONDAY, 20th FEBRUARY 1978-INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY [More…]

• The South Australian Government is committed to the principle that democracy only truly exists when citizens, as nearly as is practicable, are given an effective say in the decisions affecting their lives. [More…]

• An essential aim of industrial democracy is to ensure that an employee can move out of the situation where he is merely the object of economic circumstances decided by someone else. [More…]

• But industrial democracy is a practical commonsense approach to improving the job satisfaction of employees and the efficiency and effectiveness of organisations in which they work. [More…]

• South Australia’s Tripartite Industrial Democracy Committeecomprised of leading employer, union and Government representatives- maintains that joint consultation, the delegation of responsibilities and employee involvement in the decision-making process will solve many problems because dissatisfied employees are given the opportunity to reduce the sources of dissatisfaction. [More…]

• Essentially, then, industrial democracy is concerned with providing employees with the opportunity and the right to influence decisions within their work organisation. [More…]

• There are many forms industrial democracy programmes might take. [More…]

• However, industrial democracy cannot be viewed in isolation. [More…]

• They are often not responsive to initiating industrial democracy programmes during the present economic climate. [More…]

• However, in South Australia my Government’s Unit for Industrial Democracy has been working closely with several private companies undertaking industrial democracy programmes. [More…]

• But it is a form of industrial democracy that has worked to enhance the efficiency of the organisation in terms of productivity. [More…]

• The development of industrial democracy has also improved the employees lot. [More…]

• However, because of the current economic climate, there is no pressure being placed upon private sector organisations to undertake industrial democracy programmes. [More…]

• No major industrial democracy initiatives that involve structural changes will be brought about by legislation in the private sector until the 1980s. [More…]

• In South Australia our main focus in the industrial democracy area is in the public sector. [More…]

• As a result of our experiences with industrial democracy programmes in more than half of our departments, the Government is currently looking at the Public Service Act with a view to making some important changes. [More…]

• Simply by pluralising the word ‘officer’ we could open up the opportunity for meaningful industrial democracy situations and semi-autonomous work groups to develop. [More…]

• In some, both management and employees have to date shown no real interest in or awareness of industrial democracy. [More…]

• In others, like the Fire Brigade and the State Government Insurance Commission, employees have shown considerable interest in being involved in industrial democracy initiatives. [More…]

• My Government will amend this Act so that all legal impediments to the development of different forms of industrial democracy are removed. [More…]

• Yet, we are not legislating for industrial democracy. [More…]

• The South Australian Government recognises that its industrial democracy policy must proceed and develop pragmatically. [More…]

• We will not lay down a blue print for industrial democracy and insist that it will ‘do the job’. [More…]

• However, the South Australian Government is committed to removing legislative obstacles to industrial democracy. [More…]

• I believe that industrial democracy programmes will help develop positive attitudes among directors, shareholders, management, employees and trade union officials about the aims and objectives of work organisations. [More…]

• We recognise, however, that management and employees may be interested in industrial democracy for different reasons, but the absence of a common motive should not be seen as an obstacle. [More…]

• A sincere and genuine implementation of an industrial democracy programme will improve job satisfaction and the efficiency and effectiveness of organisations. [More…]

• I thank you for inviting me here today and I look forward to meeting many of you at our International Industrial Democracy Conference, to be held in Adelaide in May. [More…]

• An executive governing without the sanction of the Parliament is the hallmark, not of a democracy, but of a dictatorship. [More…]

• Had he not acted as he did, had he not prevented the unconstitutional designs of the last Government being consummated, the shape of Australian democracy would have been twisted and distorted. [More…]

• After all, I suppose the opportunity to do this is basically what a democracy is all about. [More…]

• Consequently, I believe it is relevant to say that it is on the determination and capacity of people to collect information, sift it and analyse it, that the future of this free enterprise democracy, as of any free enterprise democracy around the world, is largely dependent. [More…]

• It has spoken strongly on two occasions in just over two years and it has endorsed the Australian way, the free enterprise democracy of people living within a legal system of restraint which they have developed themselves and which they impose themselves. [More…]

• I suggest that the first of the basic facets of a free enterprise democracy may be the diginity and security of the family unit. [More…]

• The second basic facet to a free enterprise democracy revolves around equality of opportunity. [More…]

• The third facet of a free enterprise democracy- the Australian system- relates to the profit motive. [More…]

• The point I make is that if our sort of democracy is to survive we must recognise that freedom itself is a somewhat meaningless word unless it is freedom within a measure of discipline. [More…]

• I mention those few basic yardsticks of a free enterprise democracy, not because they are the only ones, but because I think it is worth while and proper that we should consider the system which we have developed and which has developed us. [More…]

• It is becoming fashionable to say that representative democracy has failed us. [More…]

• It behoves the Government to recognise that it should support in a legislative framework and a political atmosphere those in institutions within societies who are the constitutionalists who believe in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is the direct antithesis of democracy. [More…]

• That has to be achieved if Australia is to reach political maturity and a state of full democracy. [More…]

• That is the state of lack of democracy in which this country finds itself. [More…]

• The result is that there will be an early general election for both Houses and the people can do what, in a democracy such as ours, is their responsibility and duty and theirs alone. [More…]

• Earlier in the Address-in-Reply debate Senatory Chaney pointed out that a major theme in much of the public life of the Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowen, has been a great respect for democracy and its various institutions as well as for the principles of liberal democracy. [More…]

• The plan that was used to overthrow democracy in Greece was the plan that was devised by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to protect Greece. [More…]

• This is an outrageous twist of democracy. [More…]

• The Parliament should be a place where democracy exists not only in theory but also in practice. [More…]

• If we believe in democracy and in the rights of people, although I certainly do not believe in proportional representation I tell you that now- while we have this situation we must accept it. [More…]

• If Senator Harradine or any member of a minority party has proven objections and can show factually that the Standing Order is not operating in the true sense of democracy in this chamber, I will be happy to take a different stand when the time comes to make this procedure a permanent part of the Standing Orders. [More…]

• We have to remember that Parliament is the focal point of democracy in this country. [More…]

• Therefore, as has Senator Wright, I strongly oppose this move, which I think is a negation of democracy. [More…]

• If, for example, a friendly country which Australia regarded as a democracy was in serious difficulties- had been invaded by another country- and we believed it was to our advantage strategically as well as morally to support it, I imagine that although we were not in a position to send our own forces there we would allow recruitment in Australia. [More…]

• One suspects that it was only because of the peculiar processes of United States democracy that there began to be very serious concern in most democratic communities about these issues. [More…]

• As I say, those sorts of activities have been revealed by the peculiar processes of United States democracy which we all sometimes criticise but which I believe on occasions we have reason to envy. [More…]

• perfectly permissible for anyone in a democracy to dissent from the policies of the Government - [More…]

• it might be useful to take as a point of departure the familiar proposition that the distinction between dissent and subversion lies in the dividing line between the use and the abuse of the instruments of democracy. [More…]

• If democracy means anything the Parliament should have the facilities to enable it to work properly. [More…]

• Mr President, I appreciate that it has been very difficult for you and for your colleague Mr Speaker to indulge in a mass Athenian-style democracy consultation in cases like this. [More…]

• I think such measures as are introduced should be scrutinised by a committee- and I think the Privileges Committee is probably the most appropriate committeewhich contains representatives of all parties in this Parliament so that we can somehow protect the democratic processes and practices of our parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Some of the things that are happening from the point of view of the imposition of an authoritarian attitude by governments make me feel that our freedom and the preservation of our democracy may be at risk. [More…]

• It is a great thing about a democracy that the majority tends to be right. [More…]

• They have become very tired of his prejudices, his biases, his basic lack of democracy, his irrascible behaviour, his irresponsible utterings, his extraordinary behaviour pattern, his ban on street marches which has created concern in this Parliament and in Queensland generally and his very unreasonable attitude in respect to Mr Milan Brych. [More…]

• In the interests of Australian democracy let the Senate take a stand and again say, not that it will halt a budget to force an election but that it will halt a particular piece of legislation on a most sensitive matter of the highest significance in Australia’s national history beginning at the definition of race relations in this country for the next 50 years. [More…]

• Is that the way in which we proceed in an Australian democracy? [More…]

• What I find most lacking in report is that it is assumed as a matter of desirability in the interests of the listening public that if there is an opportunity to broadcast parliamentary debates, it should be taken up by the Parliament itself; that listeners will in some way be gratified by that decision; that the process of parliamentary democracy in Australia will be better understood; and the cause of the Parliament will be advanced by increasing the hours of broadcasting. [More…]

• I will take this wonderful idea of democracy and participation a little further. [More…]

• That does not excite my idea of Liberal equity in modern democracy. [More…]

• 20- New Patterns of Industrial Democracy for Women. [More…]

• Government and it is a defeat for democracy. [More…]

• Of course, anything which damages community relations and our system of justice in this democracy is a matter of public importance. [More…]

• He believed in politics and the place of politics in democracy. [More…]

• In recent times he has done a great deal to seek, through democratic processes, to build a consensus which is fundamental to the maintenance of democracy. [More…]

• This is perhaps the most serious of the attacks on the very foundations of democracy which we have yet experienced. [More…]

• In the face of such a tragic and barbaric incident, we can all resolve again that democracy can be protected and will finally prevail only by a firm defence against such terrorism. [More…]

• If people protest, if they do not want the plant built near them or built at all, if they do not want to work on it, if they try to talk other people out of working on it, if they try to acquaint other people with the problems- if they use all the forms of democracy that we believe in to express a point of view to fellow citizens- under this legislation they can be jailed. [More…]

• In a matter so important to the public, the general people, as this one I believe, daunted as 1 am by the primitive nature of our institutions as compared with the advanced nature of solution to scientific questions, that in a democracy we have to maintain the true office of parliament. [More…]

• That phrase spoken by a member of the Royal family, to whom Sir Robert was so proud to look as the pillar of democracy, was as appropriate as it was simple. [More…]

• No greater tribute could have been paid to a man who was himself a bastion of democracy than to have Prince Charles, representing the Queen, take a leading part in Sir Robert’s funeral service in his own church, in his own home city. [More…]

• To exclude from such discussions and to prevent contributions from representatives of sizeable minority groups represented in Parliament, is to deny the very process of democracy- something which this Government has supposedly pledged itself to uphold. [More…]

• I repeat that in those days the members of that Committee saw grave defects in the Constitution and made recommendations about those defects in relation to matters which I think are of increasingly fundamental concern to the economic efficiency of this country and, if we are to be a viable democracy in the 1980s, issues which are of the utmost importance. [More…]

• We talk about lack of democracy in board rooms. [More…]

• The matter that I shall debate is one of the basic tenets of Australian democracy, namely, the freedom of the individual to offer himself for public service in the Parliament. [More…]

• Political leaders in Australia should do everything possible to foster the cause of democracy. [More…]

• With Parliamentary democracy under some threat in this modern age, it is of great importance that as few restrictions as possible are placed on people who desire to contest Federal elections. [More…]

• That is where the danger to democracy lies. [More…]

• Government control of the arts is antithetical to democracy and I would point out to honourable senators that government control of the arts exists only in countries that have totalitarian political systems. [More…]

• It has been said again and again that the independence of the electoral commissioners is fundamental to the working of democracy because of the trust that people place in them. [More…]

• According to the article, the tribe has been run as a true democracy. [More…]

• I believe that if we have delegates to a constitutional convention representing the executive governments of the houses of parliament of the various States of Australia, what we will have is discussion which takes place on the basis of what is most convenient for an executive government rather than what is in the best interests of democracy and federalism in Australia. [More…]

• Thank God for the opportunity for democracy to prevail in a way which relates peculiarly to a federal compact. [More…]

• Why should the people of Australia not have some say directly about those people who are to discuss the future amendments to their Constitution, as opposed to the executives which are so far removed by processes of election from the people that, whilst we can say that democracy prevails, we cannot say that for this purpose democracy prevails. [More…]

• It would not be proper for me to comment in detail on what is occurring there, but our information is that recent developments have taken place following the Peruvian Government’s preparations for elections in June this year for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to prepare the country for a return to parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Where is its democracy? [More…]

• Democracy goes out the window when they are in government. [More…]

• I believe in parliamentary democracy and I believe in achieving reforms and advancement by way of debate, discussion and common sense rather than by the law of the jungle, which has been promoted as a result of the events that took place in this Parliament in 1975. [More…]

• It deprives his electorate of a fundamental facility in a democracy, that is, easy access to parliamentary representatives. [More…]

• It is a simple process of democracy that a Minister ought to be able to explain why he or she objects to a particular amendment. [More…]

• They have a responsibility within themselves to amend their rules and ordinances so that the students on the campuses should have full democracy. [More…]

• I have talked to the vicechancellors and the principals of the colleges and have stressed that they have a direct responsibility to look at their rules and ordinances and to amend them if necessary to bring about full democracy. [More…]

• It is one of the essential arteries of democracy, and the neglect of it leads to all the confusion, mistakes and substitution of administrative decisions for law. [More…]

• This is the very cornerstone of democracy. [More…]

• Again, this is contrary to democracy. [More…]

• In a democracy self-government is both a right and a responsibility that cannot be shirked. [More…]

• It seems to the Opposition that it is a travesty of democracy where the Administrator has power to veto or to override the elected government, that is, the Legislative Assembly. [More…]

• We talk about democracy but I think this again is throwing democracy out of the window for the sake of trying to safeguard some of the Country Party seats in the Northern Territory. [More…]

• Democracy as Hailsham says is in a dilemma. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people ‘s confidence in Government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• I believe that our role in this chamber involves us not only in inter-party disputes and questions of policy that arise from time to time, but also in ensuring that democracy does work. [More…]

• While I am on my feet I merely put on the record the view that to hear someone like Senator Rae suggest that the acquisition of five members of staff for Estimates committees in this country will somehow save democracy, will somehow overcome the very real difficulties of democracy which have been created by the past behaviour of certain members of this House, is a joke. [More…]

• The Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece might have agitated against its Government, but it never attempted to set up a bogus embassy. [More…]

• The obligation to submit formal audited reports later, but as soon as possible, would remain.The Committee believes that parliamentary democracy requires that Ministers, as the representatives of the Executive branch of Government, keep both the Parliament and the people informed of the activities of departments and statutory authorities, rather then permit bureaucratic differences to provide an excuse for keeping those activities hidden from scrutiny. [More…]

• It no longer serves the need of a modern democracy based on the Westminster system. [More…]

• In my view there was no hope of this Government introducing legislation for freedom of information which would have any significant teeth and which would go anywhere near as far as did the legislation in that unusual and, in a way, great democracy, the United States, where legislation of this kind was first brought into existence after the Scandinavian countries. [More…]

• We believe that true democracy depends very much on regular consultation with the electorate- much more regular than general elections every three years. [More…]

• Beyond that, we believe that the strength, productivity and morale of a democracy depend perhaps more than is realised on the rights of citizens themselves to initiate legislation, even if this right is perhaps not exercised very often. [More…]

• The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Athenian style democracy cannot work except in a very small state. [More…]

• It is of some interest to note that when so many of the States of the United States of America introduced citizen initiative about the turn of the century it was regarded then as a radical solution to the problem of a decline in faith in representative democracy. [More…]

• They will be remedied not by trivial band-aiding but only by a conscious and determined move towards a better form of democracy. [More…]

• In a world in which democracy is so much on the retreat- I am sure that all honourable senators know that and would agree with me on that point- surely there is every reason for Australia to step boldly forward on a road towards more democracy rather than less. [More…]

• This is yet another reason why we should consider joining that enlightened group of nations, mostly small nations and middle powers like ourselves, such as Switzerland, Holland and the Scandinavian nations, who have an active interest in better forms of democracy. [More…]

• So I make this final point: Either one believes in democracy or one does not. [More…]

• As democratic socialists- we bear the label proudly- we stand for the values of equality, liberty and democracy: greater real equality in the distribution of wealth, income, power and status in the community; full respect for the personal freedom and dignity of the individual; the fullest possible opportunity for democratic participation by every individual in all the major decisions that affect his or her life in the work place and in the local community as much as in the larger political sphere. [More…]

• If a conservation group contacts me and I wish to get something from the Minister tonight I will do so rather than wait for a fortnight, because the process of democracy has to be speeded up. [More…]

• I refer, for example, to the second resolution which resolved that the committee- that is the Tasmanian Committee- write to the Government seeking its assurance that in the interests of democracy and of the suffering people concerned, it effectively raise at the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation on the human rights committee the systematic suppression of human rights by the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the foreign domination and alien subjugation by the Soviet Union of the Baltic States. [More…]

• Democracy itself is under siege all over the world. [More…]

• Disraeli once said, ironically, that in a democracy it is sometimes necessary for a government to bow to the will of the majority. [More…]

• Democracy must remain dynamic. [More…]

• In the 18th and 19th centuries an upper House was seen as a check on change and on the advance of democracy, and upper Houses usually had appropriate membership restrictions. [More…]

• Madison, the principal author of the United States Constitution, campaigned for a strong Senate ‘as a check on the democracy: It cannot therefore be made too strong’. [More…]

• This, I believe, is true democracy. [More…]

• I believe in a democracy where government is restricted, accountable to the people and close to the people. [More…]

• As I said earlier tonight, I believe in a democracy where decisions are made close to the people, where government is restricted and accountable and where there are checks and balances. [More…]

• In the War of Independence for the United States of America, some fundamental principles of democracy were enumerated. [More…]

• Indeed, we are the ones who have lost votes, or who have had a true exercise of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• ‘Democracy’, said Emerson, ‘becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors’. [More…]

• The second, a day later, was the disclosure that plans for implementation of industrial democracy in South Australia were to be quietly shelved. [More…]

• South Australia’s Industrial Democracy Unit will draw up worker participation plans based on experience with “workers councils” ‘. [More…]

• I refer now to an article in the Melbourne Age of 17 May 1978 headed: ‘Dunstan democracy scares workers’. [More…]

• If Dunstan continues to frighten industry with talk of industrial democracy and worker control then I won ‘t be able to find a job if I’m next off ‘ at this place ‘. [More…]

• For so long Mr Dunstan has done so many things and now, because we are nearing another election perhaps in 1980 or 1981, he is starting to back away a little from industrial democracy and so many other things. [More…]

• But the people know that if the Dunstan Government is elected for another three years we will see industrial democracy. [More…]

• As I understand it he showed himself to be one of the great enemies of true democracy in this country by carrying out the most outrageous gerrymander that any Premier or leader of a State has done in the history of this nation. [More…]

• This then leads us back to the dispute between the definition of ‘conservatism’, ‘liberalism’ and socialism’, and to consider how far in a democracy we can direct people. [More…]

• It is indeed my conviction that most Australians believe in the system of free enterprise democracy which is based on the family unit, which admits the profit motive within the law as being satisfactory to the desires and the dictates of human nature, which admits equality of opportunity, which admits that freedom is a relatively meaningless concept unless it is experienced within a properly conceived and majority held and enforced discipline. [More…]

• That is the free enterprise democracy which I believe is one of the things basic to out society. [More…]

• Clearly, with the loose statements emanating from the Premier about the introduction of industrial democracy, without giving any reasons for or background to the proposal but suggesting that all companies in South Australia will have to have one-third of their board of directors appointed by the Government, one-third appointed by the trade union, and the shareholders, if they are lucky, will get one-third representation on their own boards, is it any wonder that the owners of business are thinking about moving to other States? [More…]

• Mr Colin Branson, the General Manager of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry S.A. Inc., said that if the Premier wants to attract tertiary industry he should shut up about industrial democracy. [More…]

• It has industrial democracy. [More…]

• The deputations on industrial democracy in South Australia have all been met by the Government. [More…]

• The pace of that democracy is not as fast as it is in other countries. [More…]

• This is a travesty of democracy and the proposals put up by the Minister for the Capital Territory, Mr Ellicott, do not reduce the nature of that travesty. [More…]

• Among other things, he said that it was the complacency of its supporters rather than the rage of its enemies that was the greatest threat to democracy. [More…]

• Profit is just as essential to a totalitarian state as it is to a democracy. [More…]

• If this is done, the strength of a democracy is ensured and confidence and pride will return to the Australian people. [More…]

• Why do the unions continue to obstruct a sane and well planned system of industrial democracy in Australia? [More…]

• This is what the Australian Democrats mean by industrial democracy. [More…]

• I consider that this is also a political value of high importance in our sort of democracy. [More…]

• Representative democracy does not exist only where the majority makes laws for the time being. [More…]

• Representative democracy exists where the majority for the time being makes the laws but tolerates the advocacy of different points of view and the living of different life styles which do not involve violence. [More…]

• I believe that in our reaction to the social use of small amounts of marihuana by Australians we have one of the indicators of the health of our democracy. [More…]

• If I were to respond, and had the power so to do, to the last part of the honourable senator’s question, I fear that some of the mystique of democracy would disappear from around us. [More…]

• As has been pointed out by others on more than one occasion, we in the Senate provide one of the more important checks and balances within our constitutional democracy. [More…]

• It is small wonder that a degree of cynicism is developing within the Australian community about the role of government and the role of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is my view that this is a serious matter for further consideration and for further development in the interests of the smooth, effective and efficient workings of a parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• For a Minister to relinquish that responsibility and to give the power to someone else, to give sole power to someone else so that that Minister cannot then control the situation, is a breach of and a departure from parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Of course, there are many critics on both sides of the fence of the industrial democracy propositions in South Australia. [More…]

• Although the developments to which I have referred have been the subject of comment for some time in the print media available in this country, the British and American weeklies in particular, I suppose that the first acquaintance that most Australians would have had with these developments would have been the Four Corners television program ‘Democracy at Risk’ which was shown by the Australian Broadcasting Commission on the weekend of 7 and 8 October. [More…]

• I hope that all Australians will commend the delegation which is in this country and will wish West Germany great development in the future into a great democracy. [More…]

• I claim that this disruptive action has been provoked by the savage cutbacks which have been imposed by this Government- cutbacks in funding and staffing which have a clear political intent, that of limiting the independence of the ABC, of hamstringing its ability to provide the independent comment and news that are essential to Australian democracy. [More…]

• A free library, open for all, is part of the essence of democracy. [More…]

• Democracy cannot survive without access to knowledge. [More…]

• To develop and strengthen, democracy demands the widest possible contact with new ideas, new information and new horizons. [More…]

• It’s appropriate that this library will serve the greatest symbol of democracy at work- your Parliament. [More…]

• It’s a clear sign that this nation will takeand is taking- the path to freedom and democracy. [More…]

• No wonder there is cynicism in the Australian community about parliamentary promises and parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• I believe that the fundamental underpinning of the concept of representative democracy is not only that the representatives elected by individuals and citizens should make decisions of this nature and not people who are not elected by the citizens, but also that when the lives of individuals are affected they ought to have recourse against or in support of the people who made those decisions. [More…]

• A democracy places on its citizens not only the right but also the obligation to decide important and divisive issues themselves. [More…]

• If a country does not do that, it should not call itself a democracy. [More…]

• It is not a democracy. [More…]

• This is the basic principle of the kind of democracy all of us in this Parliament are supposed to cherish. [More…]

• I think that is a proper operation in a democracy. [More…]

• I respect their obligation to represent that viewpoint to each and every one of us, but it comes from people who largely accept the principle of representative democracy rather than participatory democracy which is the cause with which I would prefer to be associated. [More…]

• Having said that I support the general principles of representative democracy I think I am entitled to say that the Senate is entitled to consider the views expressed by the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly. [More…]

• So here is a clear and reasonable indication of the opinion of people in the Australian Capital Territory- the people who are, after all, directly affected and whose views in a democracy should not only be respected but should be paramount. [More…]

• It is an abhorrent position to those of us who truly accept the principles of democracy. [More…]

• That is how much opposed members of the present Government were to giving any form of democracy to the Northern Territory. [More…]

• They did not want to give people in the Northern Territory any form of democracy. [More…]

• Subsequently evidence has developed in relation to the New South Wales experience which confirms that it is in the best interests of the voters and of democracy that an optional system of voting should exist, particularly in relation to the Australian Senate. [More…]

• Parliamentary democracy requires that Ministers, as the representatives of the Executive branch of Government, keep both the Parliament and the people informed of the activities of Departments and Statutory Authorities, rather than permit bureaucratic differences to provide an excuse for keeping those activities hidden from scrutiny. [More…]

• The new Parliament House will greatly enhance the national capital, and it will also be a focal point for the ever-increasing number of Australians and visitors from overseas who wish to see at first hand the centre of Australian democracy. [More…]

• No one can foresee what effect that will have on the political parties of Australia or on parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• The policy is to have no one people dominating any other people, no black nation dominating any other black nation in Africa and I think they are going to teach us, if we would only listen and learn, a lesson in ethnic democracy where each people run their own affairs and are not intimidated or dominated by any other people. [More…]

• However, to be granted the privilege by the Government to engage in peaceful protest is not to enjoy a civil right and, surely, that is really what democracy is all about. [More…]

• In a democracyadmittedly, for the time being- the majority makes the laws but the minority is entitled to dissent from the Government’s program by peaceful, non-violent means. [More…]

• The ethical implications of this kind of intent are in themselves serious since surely under our system of democracy it is basic that when a government loses the confidence of the people through an election it also loses the right to influence the affairs of the nation in a decisive way as from that time. [More…]

• In the War of Independence for the United States of America some fundamental principles of democracy were enunciated. [More…]

• Thus one of the basic tenets of Australian democracy, namely the freedom of the individual to offer himself for public service in the Parliament, is severely limited for public servants. [More…]

• To me, this seems to be a fundamental reason for advancing ideas which would provide more democracy in this country rather than less democracy and it would increase- although this is a source of irritation- the numbers of checks and balances on the Executive. [More…]

• I say to those people that one either believes in democracy or one does not. [More…]

• If one does not believe in democracy, why not go across to an executive-type government? [More…]

• It is not a situation where one can have a little bit of democracy or more democracy. [More…]

• We do so not as a matter in which we seek any political advantage or in which we are pushing our own ideology but as a matter on which we feel genuinely that as representatives in the Senate of the people of Australia we have a right and duty at least to say: ‘You, the people of Australia have a right to know about extensions of democracy which might benefit you. [More…]

• We are getting more enlightened and intelligent people in the union movement who may even see in time that a good system of rational industrial democracy such as the West German model could also be considered in planning for this country. [More…]

• When 1 refer to industrial democracy I do not mean the sort of industrial democracy described by Mr Dunstan in South Australia. [More…]

• That is not industrial democracy at all. [More…]

• I believe that this is essential to true democracy. [More…]

• I believe that it is time we looked at the options open to us in relation to public funding because almost every comparable parliamentary democracy has some form of public aid. [More…]

• The Labour Party said that as the parties were indispensable to democracy they should be assisted. [More…]

• If political parties in a democracy fail to meet these new challenges that democracy will fail. [More…]

• This motion is designed to test the opinion of the Senate on the problems of our parliamentary democracy, which I outlined in this chamber some months ago, and the possible role of the Senate in overcoming those problems. [More…]

• What we are becoming is not a democracy but, to use Lord Hailsham ‘s expression, an elective dictatorship. [More…]

• Government by the Public Service is actually moderately good government but has little to do with democracy and nothing to do with the parliamentary system. [More…]

• In a democracy one should aim to delegate Executive power to the body closest to the people on whom that power can be effectively exercised. [More…]

• It is for that reason that I maintain that the proposal warrants proper consideration as one part of the practical proposals that might be considered by the community in the general aim of strengthening parliamentary democracy in Australia. [More…]

• We heard a lot from Senator Rae, at the time he mentioned, about the Westminster tradition, about the responsibility of the Executive to report to the Parliament- both Houses of the Parliament, I might add, as Senator Rae frequently reminds us- about the necessity, in order that parliamentary democracy may survive, for us to get such reports, and about the Executive being responsible to both chambers of this Parliament. [More…]

• One of the things we will see over there is the first signs of ethnic democracy. [More…]

• That is quite irrelevant because democracy is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. [More…]

• You do not have democracy in order to get better water supplies; you have democracy for the sake of having it. [More…]

• In India there is democracy. [More…]

• In Sri Lanka there is democracy. [More…]

• In both Malaysia and Singapore, with all their faults, there are at least elements of democracy. [More…]

• I believe that we have a moral responsiblity to align ourselves with all of those democratic countries whenever we can, to make it clear that democracy is important to us not only domestically but also internationally. [More…]

• In my view, we ought to be putting forward the proposition that the ideology to which we subscribe is an ideology of democracy, of human rights. [More…]

• Senator Wheeldon spoke first about human rights and democracy. [More…]

• The statement put down by the Government is a statement on human rights and democracy and how Australia sees the world situation. [More…]

• Although I readily acknowledge that citizen initiative does enjoy some current popularity in certain overseas countries, particularly the United States, it is true that the idea of citizen initiative and a referendum dates from the time, and was most fashionable at the time, when nations were essentially run by elites elected by rich and powerful minorities, when full adult franchise was unknown, when representative democracy was not fully developed, and when there was genuine frustration at the absence of an opportunity for the popular voice to make itself heard in the business of government. [More…]

• Let me turn to another aspect of this problem: The cost of citizen initiative in the sense of the resources that need to be expended if an initiative and referendum system is to be introduced, and the implications of that cost for the quality of the democracy it is supposed to embody. [More…]

• I recall in particular his remarks, when seeking unsuccessfully to introduce this matter last week, that one was either for or against democracy. [More…]

• Are those of us who oppose this system against democracy in the way in which Senator Mason suggests that we must be? [More…]

• Far be it for me to concede, after the events of 1975, that our present system of democracy is perfect, but the point that has to be made is that our system of government is one of representative democracy in which the people make a choice between the people and the parties that they want to represent them on the basis of the programs produced by those seeking election. [More…]

• That, I suggest, would be the ultimate tragedy for Australian democracy if his proposal were to come to fruition. [More…]

• 89 on the Notice Paper- by Senator Mason relating to the whole subject of democracy by referendum as against representative democracy, which is a question that has arisen in the United States in particular in recent times. [More…]

• The determination of the people in those countries is to win for themselves the very things that we take for granted; that is, selfdetermination, democracy, a decent sharing of wealth and living in peace within their nation and with other nations. [More…]

• The honourable senator and I can sit back and say: ‘Well, it is not quite the same form of parliamentary democracy’. [More…]

• In recent years Spain has passed from being an oppressive feudal state to being a democracy, however fragile that democracy may be. [More…]

• Certainly external pressure and moral exhortation was needed from countries outside the area to make sure that that election was completed, but it was completed and we have a democracy there. [More…]

• George Fernandez, who is the leader of a sister party to the party that sits on this side of the House, has been released from gaol in India as part of the return to democracy in that country. [More…]

• We should try to be perceived in the world as being in favour of democracy, human rights and human freedom, and where we see those things abused we should oppose it and express our opposition. [More…]

• Senator Kilgariff said that the statement of the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Mr Peacock) was all about human rights and democracy. [More…]

• What this means is that some people who take advantage of our democratic and parliamentary system and who live in a representative democracy with all the advantages which it confers on them, are not prepared to pay for the services which they expect this Parliament to provide in the community. [More…]

• One thing that comes to mind is his adherence to the basic principles of democracy and to the right of the Senate to act in a proper and conscientious manner in respect of its responsibilities. [More…]

• That is what democracy is supposed to be all about. [More…]

• Everyone who lives in a democracy would support the argument that it is the most desirable form of government because it should maximise the freedom of the individual in society. [More…]

• Most people are prepared to accept some delay and some inefficiency in the workings of a democracy as the price they pay for safeguarding those freedoms. [More…]

• This is fundamental to the long-term survival of a democracy. [More…]

• The maxim laid down by Cicero, ‘Salus populi suprema lex’ is perhaps the guiding attitude behind the development of security services in a democracy. [More…]

• For the purpose of this analysis it might be useful to take as a point of departure the familiar proposition that the distinction between dissent and subversion lies in the dividing line between the use and the abuse of the instruments of democracy. [More…]

• Although the FBI’s crimes may have threatened our democracy even more than the Watergate crimes didbecause the FBI’s lawlessness has been going on for such a long time on such a broad and pervasive scale, and because it has had such a chilling effect on freedom of expression and assembly- it seemed that the government wasn’t going to do anything about these abuses of the law after their disclosure. [More…]

• The nature of democracy is that it is a publicly observable process, that decisions are made as a result of information made available to the public, debated by the public and dealt with ultimately by the elected representatives of the public. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• We pay lip service to grass roots democracy. [More…]

• I agree that the two Houses have separate functions, but in this parliamentary democracy they also have similar functions. [More…]

• It concerns Mr Porter, that famous upholder of democracy, along with his friends, Bjelke-Petersen, better known as Holy Joe and Mr Hinze, better known as Ramu. [More…]

• They went to talk to people who stand up for democracy and to tell those people what is happening in this country. [More…]

• I suggest also that it is totally repugnant to the meaning of democracy to have powerful agencies investigating and reporting upon private citizens without those agencies being accountable to an elected body. [More…]

• The real crux of the issue is how in a democracy we can maintain objectivity without a security agency becoming the plaything of a political party. [More…]

• Even if Dr Cairns cannot take it any further, the matter ought not to be allowed to rest: it raises questions of great importance about the proper place of a security organisation in a modern and stable democracy like Australia. [More…]

• Disagreement, and the ability to express it, is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• They have demonstrated that they have an attitude towards media manipulation which is bad for democracy. [More…]

• I ask those concerned to do this in the interests of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Disagreement, and the ability to express it, is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• This Bill does not comply with the general principles of democracy or democratic government. [More…]

• I took heart when he said that there is no need for security if we have a pure democracy. [More…]

• It has been said that because of the restrictions on democracy in Australia there will be a greater number of acts of terrorism and mob violence. [More…]

• The way in which the people working on that project went about establishing their case, explaining their case, appeared before the independent inquiry, presented their case and persuaded the inquiry of the validity of their case is an exercise in real participatory democracy on the one hand, in that people who are interested and informed can bring recommendations to the Government; and a real outpouring of concern for natural resources, the environment and conservation on the other hand. [More…]

• It will not be protected if ASIO, under its charter, past, present or future, uses the same sort of personnel and adopts the same sort of attitudes as it has for the last 30 years- people of prejudice, people of the belief that everybody who engages in legitimate political activity in some way can be involved in unlawful acts and subversive action, and is thus a threat to the democracy in which we live. [More…]

• One of the conditions of democracy is freedom of information. [More…]

• If the Minister cannot be trusted with the information without its having been vetted by an official, we are in fact denying one of the basic tenets of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Surely this is one of the most worrying things for all of us who believe in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It has been said on a number of occasions in this Senate that parliamentary democracy is on the decline throughout the world and that the number of parliamentary democracies declines every year. [More…]

• On the Indian subcontinent where only recently parliamentary democracy received one of its greatest victories in years- I refer to Indiaand where an Opposition which was thought to be in a hopeless situation was able to win power through the ballot box this tragic situation occurs. [More…]

• It is to be deplored by all of us who believe in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• If democracy means anything we have to maximise the power and responsibility of the elected official at the expense of the unelected. [More…]

• He says that, as well, there must be a redistribution of economic power; industrial democracy must be encouraged where workers challenge the prerogatives of bosses on the how, when and where of production. [More…]

• The reason I say that is the well established and accepted argument, certainly in the United States, that the implications of the use of these powers go primarily to the chilling effect that their use has on the political activity which is essential to the workings of democracy. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• In those circumstances, the Opposition’s amendment, because I believe that potentially it creates more problems than it is likely to solve, is not one that would have my support, however, the power that the clause currently vests in the DirectorGeneral is a power which, within the system of parliamentary democracy that we know in many ways is an unwise one to so vest. [More…]

• But, if the only test of a man’s habits is that he holds views different from those of the regime itself, clearly one would share Senator Puplick ‘s expression of distaste that what is being done is setting a kind of precedent in the world for very grave instability and of course a total lack of democracy. [More…]

• I presume that by and large in a parliamentary democracy the real sanctions that exist against the misbehaviour of Prime Ministers, Ministers, Leaders of the Opposition or members are basically not particularly legal sanctions. [More…]

• In our view, they are not appropriate for a country like Australia which has pretensions to a degree of sophistication and democracy in government to impose on the people of Norfolk Island. [More…]

• There is no evidence whatsoever, either on the face of the legislation or in the way in which it is likely to operate in practice, that the Executive Council will be any kind of bulwark of democracy in Norfolk Island. [More…]

• These include: Firstly, parliamentary procedures and precedents and parliament as an institution with particular reference to the Westminster system; secondly, the history of the Commonwealth Parliament since Federation, including biographies and photographs of all senators and members; thirdly, works by Australian Federal parliamentarians, especially first editions inscribed by authors; and fourthly, classical works in political science, especially those contributing to the present form of parliamentary democracy in Australia. [More…]

• Therefore, your financial assistance will not only serve to honour a great Queenslander who has dedicated his life to the preservation of our free enterprise democracy, but it will also help to ensure the continued strength and effectiveness of a political organisation committed to the same great cause. [More…]

• This is the only Western democracy in the whole world in which there are no longer any taxes of any type on capital. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• Indeed, it is potentially more destructive of civil rights, justice and democracy than many other laws and activities that the Attorney-General is so ready to attack. [More…]

• The Wran Labor Government is engaged in a systematic pack rape of parliamentary democracy in New South Wales and is not to be allowed in the public domain to get away with it. [More…]

• But as a senator for New South Wales I assert again that the attitude of the Premier and the attitude of the Attorney-General as his parliamentary hatchet man has been to pack rape parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• This is a record of instability without precedent in Australian history and intolerable in this democracy of ours. [More…]

• But typical of Queensland’s general attitudes to democracy, the Minister for Local Government still may overrule the electors’ petition. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• I think I made a sufficient impression because someone on the Opposition side was so interested in parliamentary control and democracy that he took up the matter. [More…]

• In fairness to both the Commonwealth Police and the State police I make the point that in the democracy in which we live there are these agents provocateur who will do anything. [More…]

• It is people like him who abuse the democracy to which we are supposed to give more than lip service. [More…]

• So, in its own way, the name of Odgers has taken its place, with us, in the context that the Erskine May image holds in the minds of students of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Because of the close ties between the two countries, the importance of this assistance to the Papua New Guinea national Budget and the need to assist in the development of parliamentary democracy, and for strategic reasons, will the Minister assure this House that there will be no reduction in the overall quantum of assistance to Australia’s nearest neighbour? [More…]

• This is the continuing dilemma in any democracy. [More…]

• This is correctly stated as the continuing dilemma of any democracy. [More…]

• Such powers, which have not been included in any constitution resulting from a legal transference of power by Britain, deny Government powers which are fundamental to a democracy- or indeed to any responsible Government. [More…]

• It would seem to me that if one of the purposes of what we describe as the Western system of government is to sponsor democracy, then at least one of those factors which should be considered when one is examining the future of some country is how democratic that country is. [More…]

• First of all, in dealing with an issue which is supposed to be related to the fundamental rights of democracy, we find that the Prime Minister (Mr Malcolm Fraser), visits the military dictator of Nigeria, apparently in order to obtain his approval. [More…]

• -Senator Evans has asked what difference it makes, but I would have thought that one of the principles we were supposed to be upholding was the principle of democracy. [More…]

• I think it is quite clear that it was not, that the last thing that was discussed was democracy. [More…]

• What is most serious, apart from the serious questions of principle involved in calling on Muzorewa to renege on solemn agreements he entered into and the disregard for democracy within Zimbabwe, is the future that this is likely to bring to the rest of southern Africa. [More…]

• I would have hoped that what we were trying to do was to remove racism and to preserve and to expand democracy. [More…]

• I think that it accentuates racism by giving support to those who believe that there can be no peaceful agreement and it damages democracy by saying, as Senator Evans has said: ‘What difference does it make if Zimbabwe is more democratic than Nigeria?’ [More…]

• I think that those people who feel as I do, that this is an important matter- it may well be that I am the only one who feels this way- should continue to be vigilant on this subject and to see that we are prepared to speak out in favour of democracy as strongly as those who are dedicated to the destruction of democracy are prepared to act towards that end. [More…]

• That is the very thing that we expect in a democracy. [More…]

• But sometimes we are faced with the question of how far we can enjoy the luxury of democracy if we are to arrive at decisions. [More…]

• A comment has been made about people’s participation in democracy, and it has been said that people can subscribe to Hansard. [More…]

• Regrettably, we find men who are not concerned about the loss of democracy. [More…]

• One of the complaints from the main organiser, a Mr Rundle who is no doubt a strong member of the Liberal Party, was that a large issue was the proposed amendment to the State’s industrial laws which Mr Rundle said would allow industrial democracy in through the back door and would reduce the right of management to manage. [More…]

• The State Government was confident that industrial democracy would not bc an issue in the election campaign . [More…]

• He was asked: ‘What do you think about that industrial democracy proposal which has been put up by Corcoran?’ [More…]

• A report in the Australian Financial Review of 6 September is headed: ‘SA Industrial Democracy Plan supported by Howard ‘. [More…]

• The Federal Treasurer, Mr Howard, yesterday defended endorsement by the Minister for Productivity, Mr Macphee, of the South Australian Government’s industrial democracy proposals. [More…]

• It drives further apart the two basic political entities in this country, and the wider that gap becomes the less chance there is for the survival of that free democracy which is the Australian system, the system of which I believe we are all so proud. [More…]

• But we recognise that, in a democracy, the ability of any Government to shape the directions of the economy is limited by the attitudes and actions of the individual groups within it. [More…]

• The plank is a direct threat to democracy. [More…]

• While the Labor Party mouths platitudes about democracy in trade unions, it has denied an ALP Government any way of putting it into practice. [More…]

• Let those people who live within the protection of our representative democracy contribute to its maintenance according to their means. [More…]

• Regrettably, we find men who are not concerned about the loss of democracy. [More…]

• Regrettably, we find men who are not concerned about the loss of democracy.’ [More…]

• Whilst members of the Government parties preach democracy, they do not believe in it. [More…]

• That is the threat to our democracy. [More…]

• If we are to save the Parliament and to save democracy in Australia, I appeal to Government back benchers to get behind Ministers such as Senator Guilfoyle to ensure that there is a revolt against this Government’s attempt to disallow the Parliament the right to discuss prominent issues. [More…]

• Because of the close ties between the two countries, the importance of this assistance to the Papua New Guinea national budget and the need to assist in the development of parliamentary democracy, and for strategic purposes, will the Minister assure this House that there will be no reduction in the overall quantum of assistance to Australia’s nearest neighbour? [More…]

• assistance will not only serve to honour a great Queenslander who has dedicated his life to the preservation of our free enterprise democracy, but it will also help to ensure the continued strength and effectiveness of a political organisation committed to.’ [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• In a democracy people have to be persuaded. [More…]

• When the military junta was in power in Greece a Greek committee known as the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece was kept under fairly close surveillance by the Commonwealth Police and police special branches in the States. [More…]

• If these high standards were not upheld, the people’s confidence in Government- a confidence which is fundamental to Australian democracy- would be undermined. [More…]

• It is an example of participatory democracy, which I believe should be the cornerstone upon which governments operate in respect of all development that takes place in regions throughout Australia. [More…]

• On the question of public funding I ask: Is it democracy that a party with the most money- to put it at the least, the most affluent- has an advantage over all other parties? [More…]

• Is it in the spirit of democracy that if a party has millions it can then flood the media with that money? [More…]

• Is it in the spirit of democracy that that party therefore has an advantage over other political parties? [More…]

• That is an example of the sort of democracy that comes from the Government side. [More…]

• They would be used only where these rights, fundamental to any democracy, are threatened. [More…]

• Transferring so much work to machines may produce something like Athenian Democracy; Athenians could be equal because they had the slaves to do the work for them. [More…]

• That is what democracy is all about. [More…]

• Democracy is about the rights of every individual in Australia. [More…]

• I believe the freedom of the individual to behave just as he pleases is mistaken for democracy. [More…]

• They forget that they have obligations and responsibilities in our democracy. [More…]

• They are not in favour of democracy. [More…]

• They wanted to show their objection in the strongest way by saying that they would not consult with the Government until it removed that threat to democracy. [More…]

• It is a matter of great regret that despite the measured opposition by those who have been involved in the industrial movement in a full time capacity, those who have been involved in understanding industrial legislation and despite the attempts of the Opposition to suggest to the Government the unworkability of this piece of legislation, it goes without saying that the whole process of parliamentary democracy and those opposing voices will be unheeded. [More…]

• It is no wonder that parliamentary democracy is under challenge in this country. [More…]

• First, we live in a democracy and cannot force people to work if they refuse to. [More…]

• I always thought very proudly that Australia was a democracy and that it was one of the few countries in the world where democracy counts for anything. [More…]

• If there is no democracy in any sector of the community, the people do not respond to the community’s needs. [More…]

• Having experienced three, four or five years in a liberal democracy such as Australia these people return home with an understanding which can only benefit our commercial and political relations with those countries. [More…]

• My colleagues on the Committee- Senator Missen and Senator Evans- have dealt with the central importance for the working of modern democracy of effective public access to government information. [More…]

• But not only that; I believe that in the United States it has proved to be a great factor in helping to provide a new awareness of the value of democracy. [More…]

• If we believe, as the Committee has clearly stated, that democracy as a system of government is operational only when there is available a maximum degree of public information about what the elected representatives of the people, and their permanent servants, are up to- if that belief is held not only by the Committee but also by the members of the Parliament who constitute the Executive- I believe the report and its recommendations should see their way speedily into legislative form. [More…]

• It is no use just looking at what they say; but if they say that with their system there will be greater freedoms, more democracy and greater justice than under the systems existing elsewhere in the world, surely all of us have a necessity to examine how they do conduct their own societies so see whether their words and the claims they make about superiority of their system and the desirability of that system being adopted by other countries is borne out by what one sees practiced within their own society. [More…]

• They say that democracy is all right in Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand but that it does not work elsewhere. [More…]

• One often wonders how far democracy is going to the extreme right of the political spectrum, and undoubtedly under this Government assaults are being made on democracy. [More…]

• Human rights, and respect for human rights, are in fact a precondition of democracy and a precondition of the rule of law. [More…]

• In fact, it is the respect for individual human beings and individual human rights that makes democracy possible and the rule of law an achievable aim of civilised societies. [More…]

• It ought to be recalled that democracy, civil liberties and human rights are a fragile flower. [More…]

• In his Menzies Oration delivered on 12 May 1978 in Sydney, he warned about the problems of centralised democracy which required us to write down limitations upon the power of the Parliament. [More…]

• The Convention did, however, discuss almost to the end the most celebrated of American ‘rights’, and there were more reasons for discarding or diluting them than an unshakeable faith in parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• It is not democracy to have such a situation. [More…]

• Democracy obviously does not exist simply where the majority for the time being makes the law. [More…]

• In other words, it would regard, as I think Senator Puplick put most eloquently, rights as being an inherent attribute of being fortunate to the resident within the Australian democracy and that State boundaries and State jurisdictions and the accident of birth and the accident of residence should play no part in the question of whether an Australian resident is entitled to vindication in an impartial court of his rights. [More…]

• The Senate, in debating the issues of racial discrimination and human rights, is really beginning to concern itself about democracy and about the interpretation of democracy as it is applied. [More…]

• We, of course, claim to be a democracy. [More…]

• The word itself needs quite a degree of analysis to see whether in fact our understanding of it is acceptable, because clearly democracy means different things to different people, to different groups and certainly different parties and to different governments. [More…]

• Consequently, if we were to follow through that thinking we could probably come to some interesting conclusions, particularly in relation to what Senator Bonner has just said about how those who are discriminated against would see what democracy is really about. [More…]

• It is because of the deficiencies in democracy, as we practice it, that government, responding to some degree of public pressure and demand, has the need to introduce legislation that would extend the principles of democracy and make it a much more meaningful form by which society shall function. [More…]

• I am sure that the concept of democracy of the Premier of Queensland, Mr Bjelke-Petersen, would differ from the concept of democracy of Senator Bonner. [More…]

• I believe that the concept of democracy of Senator Missen would differ fundamentally from the concepts of democracy of even members of his own party. [More…]

• I find that I have a broader concept of what democracy is about than some members of my own party. [More…]

• If we apply the yardstick of what democracy is really about, we need to analyse society itself to see whether in a democratic society power is shared and whether there is a means by which citizens can feel that they participate in the affairs of society and of government, whether it be in the form of representative democracy or participatory democracy. [More…]

• We need to analyse the role that a Lang Hancock has in democracy, as defined in this country, and compare it with the roles of a black or migrant woman or the roles of other disadvantaged groups. [More…]

• I would say that John Singleton is a person whose concepts of democracy would differ from mine. [More…]

• Before the dinner break I was speaking about the need to see these pieces of legislation in the context of democracy within our country and the fact that we had to introduce such legislation being an indication of some of the deficiencies within our society. [More…]

• Democracy requires respect for human rights, as it requires acceptance of the rule of law. [More…]

• If we analyse democracy a little further we see that it also demands a society of equality, of a degree of equity for all of its citizens. [More…]

• The fact that we have to legislate to that end is something of an indictment of those who merely speak of democracy in parrot fashion. [More…]

• I suppose that is why people such as Mr Killen and Senator Puplick in recent times have pointed out how fragile is our democracy, how the scars remain after certain events. [More…]

• One cannot say that we live in a democracy or equal society when, for example, even in the reporting of the debates of the Parliament, one person sitting up in the Press Gallery can be said to have a lot more power than one who sits at the table itself, inasmuch as what the former decides to report plays a part in disseminating what is said in this place. [More…]

• So there would be no question that we have a very long way to go in really applying the fundamental principles of democracy and of overcoming all the inequalities that exist within our society, of providing a basis by which minority views are heard, listened to, and often understood and acted upon, a basis on which we set ourselves the objective of building a much more tolerant sort of society. [More…]

• The theories of democracy and the way democracy operates ought to be examined in the light of the thousands and thousands of cases of discrimination that appear. [More…]

• So, when we are talking about our traditions in this field I think we ought to be according recognition to both the development of the common law and the development of our parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Of course, the principles of universal suffrage, the Bill of Rights enacted in 1688 and freedom of religion are some of the great achievements of parliament and parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• Let us acknowledge the fact that we have very strong traditions and that we have developed strong institutions in our parliamentary democracy, in our courts, in our rule of law and in what we still call in many ways the common law. [More…]

• Has the Minister noted a growing volume of reports of a new repression of political dissent in the People’s Republic of China such that, for example, the free expression of criticism of party leadership via the so-called Democracy Wall is fraught with danger? [More…]

• There was a time when such ‘high-falutin’ ‘ notions were considered the backbone of parliamentary democracy. [More…]

• That is not the understanding that the Opposition has of democracy. [More…]

• It is certainly democracy Court style and it is democracy which ought not be accepted in this country. [More…]

• In many ways the Northern Territory is subject to the administration of the Australian Parliament and the Australian Government, It is a blot on the face of democracy that neither the Minister nor the Government is prepared to stand up to the people who are trying to bushrange their way through legislation in the Northern Territory. [More…]

• Surely that is the means to approach the matter if one believes in democracy at the university campus level. [More…]

• Democracy depends upon the vigorous participation and intervention of its members in the doings of democracy. [More…]

• Democracy expects that in a voluntary fashion that drive occurs. [More…]

• It so happens that the United Nations charter states, and those who believe in democracy are of the view, that no people should be compelled against their will to join an organisation and certainly no people should be compelled against their will to contribute financially to an organisation. [More…]

• Will the Government move urgently, in the interests of a genuine democracy in this country, for a system of public funding of all political parties similar to that applying in most Western democracies, to be introduced before the 1980 election? [More…]

• As we witnessed today, that power is becoming greater as a result of a further monopolisation of the very essence of democracy- the dissemination of information. [More…]

• I go so far as to say that the Parliament of this country has been reduced in stature not only by the events of 1 1 November 1975 but also by the activities of the present Government in maintaining its power by deluding and misinforming the people in our democracy. [More…]

• By the same token, no Parliament can work unless there be an acknowledgement of past practice, together with an observation of the Standing Orders, which have been set out for no other purpose than to ensure the freedom of honourable senators to express themselves in parliamentary language and to enable democracy to operate in our parliamentary system. [More…]

• The very rudiments of democracy were not even observed. [More…]

• (I believe conditions at the Hope Vale jail are an insult to human dignity) I pointed out to them, ‘Where is our democracy? [More…]