People - the Premier, for example - have also been wont to say that the Hare-Clark system has never been under threat; that it presupposes no given number of representatives per seat, and that the seven members per electorate model from which we changed in 1998 (amid considerable public acrimony) was not part of the original deal. And this is true - though only up to a point. Back at the time of its inception there were also far fewer Tasmanians than there are now, and government was a much simpler matter. To my mind it is the large heartedness and generosity of intent on the part of the framers of the system that is the important thing. I go so far as to maintain, in fact, that the generosity built into the electoral system is symbolically central to the meaning of this place, Tasmania. The change in the size of the parliament in 1998 from a 35-strong House of Assembly to 25 thus violates something very fundamental about Tasmania itself, what it promises, and what it might stand for on a larger stage.

It was also a constitutional coup, because what was dressed up as a mere machinery of government efficiency measure was actually an attempt – a failed attempt as it transpires – to rig the character of parliamentary representation. Nevertheless, from the change everyone has lost – including those who can’t abide the Greens (the intended victim of this oh-so-unsubtle piece of political chicanery). We had it, before the coup, exactly right. I look at it this way. If I stand on the corner of a block in town, 1 in 5 of the people walking past me are not supporters of the Club of Two. And 1 in 10 - and somewhat more in the last election - of those people strolling by support the Greens. Now, I'm not particularly concerned that it's the Greens. It could be the Callithumpians, or the Flat Earth Party, or it could be One Nation. But one in ten people seems to me to constitute a critical democratic mass. And 1 in 10 is about the level of support you needed, until the coup, to get a seat around the democratic table in Tasmania.

And so I think the system - the system we had in 1998 but do not have today - pretty much got it right. That not only did it admirably do for Tasmania - but that it could stand as exemplar of what a system of representative democracy can be. A model for the rest of the world. Along with world-revered wetland wilderness, the artefactual remains of convictism, fine food and wine, and fast catamarans, Tasmania's system of strong, formal democracy was something we could have showcased to the world. It was a product ripe for export.

So why did the most powerful forces in Tasmania want to change it? They wanted to change it because they wanted to retreat to a politics of deals behind closed doors, a politics in which the People’s House is reduced to the status of rubber stamp for decisions made at that shadowy interface between big money, senior bureaucrats, and the strongmen of whichever of the two parties of capital happens to be in power at the time.

Make no mistake - this was the sure and certain consequence of the change to parliament, as the Report of the Morling Inquiry made abundantly plain. The new arrangement involved a massive retreat from democratic accountability, decision-making transparency, the capacity of the individual to influence the decisions that he or she must subsequently live with, and it made for a grossly inefficient parliament – as an assembly line of longstanding parliamentarians have, somewhat too belatedly, since conceded in retirement speeches. We have seen a veritable cavalcade of ‘whoops we got it wrong’ parting observations. Except that those who now say so knew they had it wrong all along – it was just that more cynical imperatives took precedence over the good health of the demos at the time.

With a parliament as small as we now have there are two choices.

We can go with a small and ineffectual backbench, one dominated by the ministry, and thus incapable of serving the important scrutiny, feedback, and training-ground-for-future-ministers roles that are the indispensible functions of a government backbench. Near-total dominance by the executive arm of parliament, in other words.

Or we can create a viable backbench by vastly reducing the number of ministers. This was the solution given credibility from its endorsement in the Nixon Report. And it is a thoroughly idiotic idea. When I minded a minister that minister's portfolio responsibilities consisted of environment, planning, Crown lands, surveying and valuation, land titles, youth affairs, employment, TAFE, industrial relations, and the regulation of labor and industry. Probably there were more that I have forgotten. And this was when there were ten ministers. Reducing the size of the ministry so increases each individual minister's policy spread that only a minister blessed with supernatural powers (and there are precious few of these on offer in the current parliament) can cope - and so ministers become even more emphatically the prisoners of their departments and the privileged interest groups they turn to for help. The result, then, is the same as with the first option - increased power to minders, bureaucrats and lobbyists as ministers are reduced to mere cyphers, and, again, the impoverishment and irrelevance of parliament.

There was some legitimation for this disastrous step, though, for this was the model - a token parliament and a minute ministry - that was recommended by Peter Nixon, a man who held parliamentary office as a member of a political party that Tasmanians have consistently and emphatically rejected, but who nevertheless brought all that alien party’s ideological baggage to his analysis, in 1998, of Tasmania’s problems. Nixon actually knew so little about Tasmania that he was able to state on television that Tasmania has the world’s highest ratio of state parliamentarians per head of population. Someone should have told him that the average number of Members in Lower Houses within political systems of less than 1million people is in fact 40! And he also said on television that any party worth its salt should be able to get 16.5 per cent of the vote. Someone should have reminded this master of humbug that the party he represented, in the jurisdiction in which he represented it (the Commonwealth of Australia no less), gets less than half that percentage of the vote - but of course that extremely small per cent of the national vote didn’t stop him, and it doesn't stop his party, from not only demanding a right to sit in parliament, but a right to hold ministries up to and including the second highest office in the nation.

This man, a visionless hack when he had his own turn at the parliamentary batting crease, had no answers for Tasmania. The Nixon Report is a sorry piece of history now, gathering dust and mice droppings at the bottom of someone’s filing cabinet. But it is worth reminding ourselves of this piece of folly. Nixon got it seriously wrong; he had no answers, only the populist cliches of the hayseed right. Nor will anyone misguidedly foisted upon us from outside have the answers. Only we, ourselves, drawing upon the full range of talent and insight available to us from across all walks of life and all shades of opinion, can solve our problems.

And whilst we’re reburying the Nixon Report, let's also consign, to the baby’s playpen this time, the infantile nonsense that is frequently trumpeted around the Liberal Party lobbies, and given voice by Michael Kent, and by sundry and diverse spokespersons for the TCCI (and, yes, by Nixon, too), that running government is no more nor less than running a business. This line is straight from the Mussolini manual of making the trains run on time. The truth is that government is about much more than an accountant's balance sheet. It is about giving voice to collective aspirations and visions, and it is about reconciling the real differences that exist between people in a civilised and creative way. It is about giving voice to peoples' hopes and to their dreams.

And so it seems to me that there are three ironies - cruel ironies - in the piece of bastardry that was played out in this island in 1998.

The first of these: we were told that people were sick of incompetent, time-serving politicians, and so they wanted fewer of them. Now the 20 per cent of the Tasmanians who don’t subscribe to the views of the Club of Two certainly have no monopoly on ideas. But that 20 per cent has shown more ideas-generating capacity over the past ten years than the other 80 per cent put together. (This is just what I would expect, incidentally, because in times of stress there is too much inertia in the centre, and too much vested in the perpetuation of the status quo, for the centre to be a fecund site for solutions.) No, in times of stress, look to the edge. But, cruel irony, it is precisely those constructive voices from the edge which, in the name of getting rid of time-serving parliamentary incompetence, the current proposal was designed to eliminate. The solution to too many time servers in parliament was to rig the system to get rid of the few who were not time-servers.

Second irony: the present proposal was intended to deliver effective government, by guaranteeing majority government. Yet the reason we had a crisis in governance in this island is that a succession of majority governments, of both major parties, over a 30 year period, saddled us with a huge debt. And who was asked to pay the electoral price for this? Why, precisely that electoral force that bore not one whit of responsibility for the debt. There is no evidence, in any case, to support the proposition that majority government is effective government. From the mid 1980s to the 1998 coup there were two majority governments and two minority governments, and by any credible standard the two minority governments were far more effective governments than the rack-up-the-debt majority government of Robin Gray and the sit-on-their-hands-and-enjoy-riding-around-in-the-big-white-cars majority government-by-vacuum of Ray Groom.

And irony number three? - that the process that culminated in a reduction in the size of the House of Assembly was set in train by a proposal by that same black hole Groom Government - a majority government - to increase parliamentary salaries by 40 per cent. And who was intended for punishment for this heinous act? Who was offered up as the sacrificial parliamentary lambs? Why, precisely those parliamentarians, the Greens, who alone at the time consistently opposed the pay rise! All very ironic. But I didn’t laugh and I’m still not laughing. What I can’t forgive is the retreat from that large-hearted generosity to cynicism and mean spiritedness. What I can't forgive is the transgression of fellow-feeling and common decency.

What we were told, we dissidents, by the Club of Two and the very many Tasmanians who supported them in this, is that our views and ideas are not welcome here. More than that, we were told that our ideas are so unwelcome, so reprehensible, so threatening, that extraordinary steps would be taken to shut us out of the political system. In 1998 was filled with a sense of deep outrage such as I hadn’t felt since November 1975. And here’s a fourth cruel irony - that the victim of that last great act of constitution-manipulating bastardry in Australian politics, the Australian Labor Party, was the architect of this one. On that account alone we were entitled, I think, to have expected better of them. The Club of Two and the big end of town tried to render my voice irrelevant and illegitimate. They tried to deny Tasmania its specialness, make it like other places, render it ordinary, a mere stock of resources for capital's plundering. They sought to deny it the truth it holds in trust for the rest of the world, a truth to do with what is democratically possible. The 1998 parliamentary ‘reform’ was not a small change of little significance, and let no-one tell you so.

But the attempt to shut the democratic doors close against the voices from the edge has failed. Ideas and values and visions can be expelled from parliament, but they can't be expelled from people's heads. The world, remember, is made by the people who turn up. Keep turning up.

(this paper is a revised text of a speech originally given – several times – during the debate over parliamentary ‘reform’ in 1998.)