Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's interesting coming and standing back here, because you feel almost disassociated from the process of the parliament. Where you find even more of a sense of disassociation from the parliament is when you're not even here or you don't have a representative here. I rise today to speak about enfranchisement, especially of those in the Northern Territory. We'll soon be seeing a further redistribution, and there's a possibility—or it's mooted—that the Northern Territory will lose one of its seats. Currently, the seat of Lingiari covers 17 per cent of our nation's surface, which means, if we extrapolate that out, there'd only be six seats in Australia. We have this absurdity of so few people representing such a wide landmass. If we were to have a redistribution in the Northern Territory where they lost a seat, we would have one seat representing approximately 200,000 people, whilst in Tasmania one seat represents about 110,000 people. This is something that we must draw a line in the sand on, especially with the National Party representing regional people in regional areas. I've had introduced into this House a bill for regional senators, which didn't seem to have much support, even though it's something that this chamber could do. But I'm not going to stand idly by and see the people of the Northern Territory disenfranchised to merely one seat.