Page 627 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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that the Government was the repository of all wisdom, and we do hold responsibility for stable and efficient administration of the ACT on behalf of its people. I do not believe that anybody in the ACT will see the Government shirk those responsibilities.
We therefore welcome and support this motion. We look forward to the inquiry's report and we will consider the findings of that report as part of our obligation to the people of the ACT.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (8.14): I think it is appropriate that this Legislative Assembly should review the matters raised in this proposed reference to a committee yet to be determined. As the Chief Minister has pointed out, up until now the debate has always been carried on elsewhere. More importantly, decisions about the lives of the people who live in Canberra - and recently I saw the population figure of 293,000, so we are close to 300,000 people - have been taken elsewhere.
To me that is essentially undemocratic because on the one hand the people who live here have a right to be involved in decisions about their way of life, and on the other hand they have a responsibility to be involved in decisions about their way of life. There has never been any doubt in my mind that there should have been self-government a long time ago, and in my view it is none too soon. It is timely that some of the matters that Mr Duby has raised be considered within the context of this organisation, an organisation consisting of members elected by the residents, electors, ratepayers and taxpayers of this Territory. To my mind there is no question whatsoever that it is an appropriate thing for these matters to be considered here in this place, so that the decisions that come from this inquiry can reasonably reflect what this community wants rather than what some Federal Minister from some remote part of Australia wants.
To address particularly the matters of reference that Mr Duby has put forward, in my view he has correctly put as number one on his list the financial agreement between the ACT and the Commonwealth Government. There is little doubt that we have been, we are, we remain at a financial disadvantage in many ways compared to other Australians. It has long been the view of many people that we have been financially well off, that we have benefited from having the Commonwealth administer this Territory. I have never accepted that view. It has always been my view that if we could untangle the morass of public accounting relating to the Australian Capital Territory, we would have found long ago that we were supporting ourselves. We would have discovered that the mumbo-jumbo of Commonwealth accounting, public accounting, has done nothing but obscure the fact that the people of this Territory have maintained themselves in terms of the revenues that they have contributed to the operation of this Territory.
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