Page 48 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 May 1989
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might say from my point of view that, if I had had my way, I would have had a more traditional structure and had an administrator, a governor-general or a governor making the sorts of decisions that in other places are made by that sort of person. However, we have not got that. We have a Chief Minister elected by the Assembly, and I think it flows fairly naturally that there should be an election for opposition leader as well.
Normally the party or parties with the majority in the Assembly form the Government and the largest party not in government forms the opposition. I hope that nothing we have done on 11 May would alter that basic premise. I would hope that in future years the largest party or parties in coalition do form the government on every occasion. I would hope that the largest party not in government does form the Opposition, and I hope that what we have done does not alter that fact. But we needed to finalise the procedure on this occasion because there was not any procedure in place to deal with the situation we found ourselves in. I hope that perhaps other parliaments one day will find that a procedure such as that which we have adopted would be useful should an occasion such as the one found ourselves in on 11 May arise in those places. It was necessary only to choose between two candidates, because two parties in this Assembly had four seats each.
There has to be, in my view, a leader of the opposition, because there has to be an opposition, and it follows ineluctably that an election needed to be held. There has been some suggestion from those members of the Rally present that an opposition could be somehow shared or in some other way not filled. I suggest, that that is a totally inaccurate and misguided point of view. It relies on the assumption that, if one is not in government, one is automatically in opposition. That is not the case; it has never been the case. I think that the members of the Rally should look across the lake to the Federal Parliament where they will see that there is a Senate in which there is a Government consisting of ALP members and an Opposition consisting of Liberal and National Party members who, by choice, have coalesced to form an official opposition. There are Democrats and Independents who sit not as the opposition, even though they are not in government, but on the cross benches.
That is the procedure which is followed in every Parliament of the Commonwealth to my knowledge and which should be followed in this Parliament. The suggestion that there should be four leaders of the opposition is quite exceptional and, I think, deserves no more comment than that. The suggestion also made by the Leader of the Residents Rally was that the Opposition cannot be the Opposition since it supported the Government in this place. I do not admit, first of all, that the Opposition generally did support the Government.
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