Vikki Campion: Remote MPs were forced to take action against their own party lines this week
Many MPs have little understanding of the challenges faced by remote communities and they proved, yet again, their ignorance in parliament this week, writes Vikki Campion.
NSW
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They stare into the camera. Voices crack. Tears well. We hear impassioned speeches in the chambers of Canberra’s Parliament House, for the marginalised, homeless, victimised and the young.
Tears dry-up, however, when members are asked to vote in a way that would help address these issues in the most afflicted area — remote Australia. Not last century, but the century before, our constitution was drafted. Not last century but the century before, Indigenous Australians didn’t have a vote, weren’t counted in the population and the Northern Territory was administered from Adelaide.
In the spirit of this arcane document, it was recommended by the Australian Electoral Commission to reduce the number of seats in the Northern Territory from two to one at the next election. If the same formula was applied to Tasmania, it would lose two. But because Tasmania is a founding state, under the Constitution, it is given 17 federal parliamentarians serving a population of 515,000, while the Northern Territory and islands have four people representing 248,000. This could have left former commando and father-of-two, Labor’s Luke Gosling, the sole MP across three different time zones, from Arnhem Land to the deep central desert to the Cocos and Christmas Islands south
of Indonesia.
There was little sympathy for the inadequate representation from MPs when fervent Constitutionalists were asked to help the Northern Territory.
Instead, remote MPs were forced to take action against their own party lines this week to try to maintain representation for those who find themselves disadvantaged through geography. In the Upper House, Country Liberal Senator Sam McMahon led the Nationals Senators to work with Labor to block moves to abolish the seat of Lingiari.
In the Lower House, independents locked step with Labor and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce to retain the two seats for the Northern Territory. While this was happening, in the House of Representatives, there was abundant empathy on display during discussion on a war in Armenia, but that was promptly put aside when the Members were asked to consider the lives and rights of the remote Maningrida community. The far north is a world that the metro-based Constitutionalists, foaming about the purity of a document authored in the 1890s, could not fathom. Paradoxically, the “purist” who believes it is proper to remove the seat Lingiari under the Constitution becomes polluted when it is about their desire to remove the crown from the same document. In their mind, the Northern Territory should lose an MP because it’s FIFO workforce and transient population means it falls below the population rules established by the electoral commission. But does is it really?
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We know many Indigenous Australians are not enrolled, speak more than 100 different dialects and remote voting is at a record low. The MPs who are most passionate about eradicating the 1.4 million sqkm seat of Lingiari have electorates they could comfortably walk across in a day. They are dealing with issues such as where to park at Balmoral Beach, while in Lingiari it’s congestion of a different type — 20 people jammed into a single house. Campaigning there isn’t “roadsiding” (aka jumping around near traffic lights with a sign) or robocalling from campaign headquarters, it’s going door-to-door on dirt roads just to get people on the electoral roll. To get to the Cocos or Christmas Islands, it’s catching one of the two weekly flights via Perth.
Nobody is taking selfies with their democracy sausage on election day because even getting to a mobile booth is hours on a dusty, corrugated road pockmarked with clapped-out 4WD’s.
Young Indigenous Territorians have the lowest enrolment rate of any demographic in the country at 67.8 per cent. In my experience growing up in rural Far North Queensland, the Indigenous vote is even lower.
About 5000 people, senior community leaders say, call Palm Island, off the coast of Townsville, home (it’s 2500 according to Census) but last election only about 550 voted. At the time the constitution came in to effect, the Northern Territory was governed by South Australia and had a population of 4765, which did not include the Indigenous inhabitants.
If the system says this is fair, then it is the system that is broken. According to Christmas Island Shire, the Northern Territory is only 4086 people short of a second seat under the quotient. Remembering that more than 4000 FIFO workers left Lingiari last year when a gas project finished, and that doctors in Alice Springs believe the gap in Aboriginal numbers in a single town can be as high as 3000 — before a voice in Parliament is lost, the numbers better be right.
So park the constitutional zealotry and reserve some compassion for the people of Lingiari.
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