Page 3668 - Week 12 - Thursday, 25 November 2021
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
That is an important point, because one of the most challenging aspects of our government is that this Assembly has to do the work that is taken up elsewhere by local town councils. Many other states and territories have upper houses to review important legislation and conduct scrutiny. All of them have some level of local government to take care of important municipal functions. In the ACT, we have to do all of that. We do it all in 35 days and we do not sit past dinner time, as we used to in this place.
Each of those functions is important—high level legislation, scrutiny of government and local government services. With the current system, we tend to focus on the first aspects. The state and national issues that impact us as a state tend to draw more focus and more attention in this place. The municipal issues tend to suffer; they tend to be neglected. We certainly do not focus half of this Assembly’s time on important municipal matters, as it could be argued we should. That is perhaps because we are trying to do all this in 35 days a year and knock off by teatime.
Given that we have these historic lows in comparison with other parliaments, I would like to talk about why that is when we have an expanded Assembly. This Assembly, a couple of terms ago, went from 17 to 25 members. It was done so that this parliament could do more. The sense was that we did not have enough members. I agreed with that at the time. The Canberra Liberals supported the expansion of the Assembly with the expectation it would mean that we could do more; it meant that we could focus on all the matters that are important to us, the state jurisdictional matters and the local government matters.
That has not happened—in fact, the reverse. We sit fewer days, we do not have select committees for estimates and we all knock off by teatime. When you look back at the quotes from Katy Gallagher, Mr Rattenbury and Simon Corbell, who all spoke on that expansion at the time, all of them made the point that the expansion of the Assembly from 17 to 25 members would indeed allow this Assembly to be more effective and to do more work. Indeed, that expansion was supported by a large body of people who saw that this Assembly needed to be bigger to address all of the issues that come under its remit. The Canberra Times, in its editorial in 2014, said:
The Assembly’s remit, a unique combination of state and local government activities, is far more complex than it was in 1989 and has expanded to take in the Council of Australian Governments and the provision of services to NSW residents in the wider region.
... … …
The current executive comprises just five ministers, with the chief minister and four others bearing portfolio loads that are far heavier than those of other state and territory ministers.
... … …
Expansion to 25 members will make the work of the Assembly more effective and efficient ...
Has that actually happened in terms of making us more effective and more efficient? I think it has reduced the workload for ministers and those in government. There is no doubt about that; they do not need to work as hard. It seems that with this desire to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video