I move:—
Before Section 3 to insert a new section as follows:—
"The Constitution shall be and is hereby amended by the deletion at the end of Article 34 of the words ‘Provided that the sixteenth member shall be deemed to have filled the vacancy first created in order of time and so on' and the substitution therefor of the words, ‘Provided that the sixteenth member shall be deemed to have filled the vacancy created by the death or withdrawal of the Senator, or one of the Senators, the unexpired period of whose term of office was greatest at the time of the election and so on.'"
The object of the amendment is to amend the Constitution in a matter that affects the order in which certain of the Senators who will be elected at the triennial elections will fill the vacancies. As Article 34 of the Constitution stands at present it reads as follows. It is a proviso at the end of Article 34:—"Provided that the sixteenth member shall be deemed to have filled the vacancy first created in order of time," and so on. At present it would or might work very unfairly as regards members after the fifteenth who are elected to the remaining vacancies. As it stands, the person who comes sixteenth in the voting would get the place of the first who had fallen out and who had created a casual vacancy. It so happens at present that the first casual vacancy that would be filled would be one in which the member would be elected for nine years, and there are vacancies for which members are elected for twelve years. The result is that the person elected sixteenth would be elected for a shorter term than the person elected seventeenth or eighteenth. That, I think, was never intended and it would work out in an unjust way. The candidate who gets the most votes should be elected for the longest term. The amendment strikes out that proviso, and puts in the proviso set out in the amendment. Provision for one of the Senators is put in with the object that there might be two of them whose term is the same, and the amendment makes provision for that.