Within a modern democracy, when does the weight of voices become an unsavoury burden?
The moment may have arrived for the NSW Parliament, which will consider for the first time whether to accept electronic petitions instead of printed pages of signatures.
The inquiry was triggered by a petition of more than 107,073 people who were calling for a ban on plastic bags, but could not table the document in parliament without creating still more waste.
Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi had attempted to table a USB stick, which is accepted in Federal Parliament and Queensland, but was told the petition was out of order as the legislative council required a hard copy.
"Ironically in trying to table more than 107,000 signatures calling for the NSW government to cut waste and ban plastic bags, we came across another huge waste issue – that I would have to print almost 4000 pages to table it," Ms Faruqi said.
"Even worse, those thousands of pages would then be scanned and electronically stored. This is absolutely absurd; it is just common sense to allow the electronic tabling of documents and the acceptance of electronic petitions.
"Sometimes it feels that the NSW Parliament is in a time warp."
Leader of government business Don Harwin later commissioned a committee to investigate the merits of introducing e-petitions and the mechanisms by which they could be accepted into the Legislative Council.
The committee is to report by the end of June.
The irony of the petition requiring to be tabled on printed paper drew ridicule on Facebook.
"Could you not transfer the signatures onto lumps of clean coal?" one person asked.
The rules on petitions in the legislative council state that they must be signed by at least one person and "be typewritten or written in ink and on paper (signatures cannot be collected or submitted electronically)".
The largest petition ever presented to the house was signed by more than 500,000 people.
Petitions signed by more than 500 people must receive a response from the relevant minister within 35 days.
