Federal Labor unveils bold plan to increase NT senate representation at party’s national conference

NT Attorney-General Chansey Paech addressed the conference in Brisbane, saying ‘give us a greater voice in parliament by increasing senate representation’.

The NT will get more senators and a federal Labor government will “respect” Territorians right to make their own laws “free from interference” under commitments added to the party’s binding platform.

Thousands of Labor faithful have gathered in Brisbane for the party’s national conference — its highest decision-making forum — to hash out a federally-binding policy platform.

A resolution passed on the floor of the conference on Friday committed Labor to addressing the “historic proportional under-representation” of the ACT and the NT and increasing the jurisdictions’ representation in the Senate.

Both the NT and the ACT have two senators each, while each state has 12, meaning Tasmania has six times the representation in the upper house with a population only double that of the NT.

Attorney-General Chansey Paech, addressing the conference, noted Territory Labor Senator Malarndirri McCarthy’s constituency covered a geographic area five times the size of Texas.

“Don’t talk about us, give us a greater voice in parliament by increasing senate representation in the ACT and the NT,” he said.

The resolution also commits Labor to respecting “the rights of self-governing territories to make their own laws, in their own interests, free from interference by the federal government”.

The party is also bound to “follow a policy of non-intervention in decision-making of the self-governing territories” and “will oppose any interventions by other political parties”.

This effectively commits a Labor-led federal government to not repeating measures like the Howard government’s controversial NT Emergency Response, better known as the Intervention.

It would also stop a federal Labor government from undoing laws set by the territories, as happened in 1996 when the federal government squashed the NT’s voluntary assisted dying legislation.

The ban preventing the NT and ACT from legalising euthanasia remained in place for nearly 30 years until it was lifted late last year after a long-running campaign.