John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I note in passing that the following local government areas in New South Wales all have populations approaching, if not over, the 200,000 population mark: Fairfield City Council, Bankstown City Council, Parramatta City Council, Liverpool City Council, Campbelltown City Council and Canterbury City Council. I could possibly add many more of the estimated 145 local government areas in New South Wales, many with populations comparable with the population of the entire Northern Territory. Given that there are likely to be further anomalies of this kind, I would encourage further elaboration on and examination of the means by which proportionality may be preserved.

I now turn to the material provision of this report, which deals with the motivation behind the moves towards statehood. As this House is aware, the people of the Northern Territory voted, in the referendum of 1998, against the proposal that the Territory should become a state. I am not one to immediately fall for arguments of populism on the one hand or of tyrannical rule on the other. As I said earlier, the reasons why we would make a new state for the purpose of admission into the Commonwealth must be based upon well-founded reasons.

When reading this report, examples are given that compare the differing standards between the powers, rights and duties of a state compared to those of the territories. Great play is made of the implied assertion that section 122 of the Commonwealth Constitution is somehow unfair because it grants a right to the Commonwealth to overturn a territorial law. I refer, for example, to the Commonwealth’s Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which amended the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 to overturn the NT Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995.

Examples such as these are quoted throughout the report in a wide range of jurisdictional issues from environmental laws to exploration, fishing and mining rights and so forth. To my mind, however, the only objective source of determination of whether the Northern Territory is at a point where it may become a state is to be found in the intrinsic governance of a territory compared to that of a state. Nothing, in my view, will be achieved from pointing to spot issues and drawing out extreme examples that test the boundaries of any laws, and then seeking to justify such cases for or against the debate as it unfolds.

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