SORRY FOR NORFOLK ISLAND

Come July 1, the electorate of Canberra will get a whole lot bigger. No longer confined to the nation's capital, it will stretch almost 2000 kilometres end to end, encompassing an area more than twice the size of Victoria.

Gai Brodtmann, if re-elected the following day, will need to trade the Comcar for a frequent flyer card to travel the 1906 kilometres  from her Tuggeranong office to her newest constituents on Norfolk Island.

If that sounds like a strange fit for Canberra, spare a thought for the Norfolk Islanders who are being shoehorned into the seat. For a subtropical island in the southern Pacific Ocean, completely dependent on seaborne transport for our existence, being part of an electorate where the previous largest body of water was Lake Burley Griffin, is alarming.

This is just one of many bizarre features of the Commonwealth takeover of Norfolk Island that will see decades of self-governance formally end on July 1. Our democratically elected Legislative Assembly has already been abolished. Community facilities and services we built, funded and ran as a community – including our school and hospital  – will become the property of the federal government.

Local legislation will be torn up, replaced by a mix of Commonwealth and NSW laws. The only remaining political representation will be a local council  – formed under the NSW Local Government Act. NSW will also run our health and education services.

Despite the role of NSW in governance and service delivery, the people of Norfolk Island will not be allowed to vote in state elections. We will have no representation in the parliament that will govern much of our lives, effectively leaving us second-class citizens.

This disenfranchisement is a cruel irony for a community at the forefront of democratic advancement. From our founding in 1856, Norfolk Island had universal suffrage, a principle brought with us from Pitcairn Island. Not only did women have the vote on Norfolk before anywhere else in Australia, they were elected to the legislature and held judicial positions, all before the Commonwealth of Australia came into existence.

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the Labor Member for Canberra is in lock-step with the man Tony Abbott imposed as Norfolk Island Administrator, the former Howard government minister and radio shock-jock who was expelled from the Liberal National Party in 2012, Gary Hardgrave.

Brodtmann and Hardgrave speak in the language of colonisation. The people of Norfolk Island are treated as primitives, unable to govern themselves. The benevolent Commonwealth government knows best. The loss of local democracy is a small price to pay for improved services. The local population has no say, because  – like children  –  they simply don't know what is best for them. This is why a referendum last year that recorded 70 per cent opposition to the takeover can simply be ignored.

The reality is far different. While our island home is a mere speck in the ocean  – less than 10 kilometres end to end –  our exclusive economic zone, a colossal area 430,000 square kilometres in size, delivers hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Canberra.

While we previously had no access to Commonwealth services, Norfolk Islanders were already paying almost $6 million a year in tax to Australia, a figure that is set to jump.

For all the talk of bringing improved services, it is clear the Commonwealth will be gaining far more out of the colonisation of Norfolk Island than the local residents ever will.

Likewise, claims that Norfolk Island has always been a part of Australia, that our decades of successful self-government were nothing more than an "experiment", and that it is impossible for a remote community like ours to be economically sustainable, fail to stack up.

That rewritten history is news to the 47 per cent of Norfolk Islanders who are descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives, the three-quarters who still speak their own indigenous language, and the countless long-term residents who are not Australian citizens. It also ignores the fact that our local parliament paid its own way for three decades straight until the global financial crisis hit.

                           

As the countdown to July 1 approaches, we only hope our new neighbours in Canberra are as passionate about the restoration of local democracy as we are.

Chris Magri is president of Norfolk Island People for Democracy and a former member of the Norfolk Island Legislative Assembly