Page 653 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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I have found now, not only as a member but also as a Minister in this Assembly, just how important self-government has become to us in the ACT. Not a day goes by that my staff do not get at least 20 calls on housing, garbage, barking dogs, footpaths, bus services and other municipal things. I agree with you, Mr Speaker, about having people work but not being paid. As the saying goes, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. I do not think anybody in this house is a monkey. I think we deserve what we get, we work hard for it.
I am quite sure the Federal members now are able to get on with making Federal policies for the whole of Australia rather than for our place in this region of the world. I have been fortunate to have had a father who was in municipal government and a husband who was in both State and Federal politics. Although I have sat on the sidelines, I have always been there to see the important roles of each and every one of these governments. I believe it is the right of all taxpayers to decide who should govern them or not, as the case may be. But here in the ACT our future was decided by a Minister who did not represent, nor live in, the Territory. The closest any of these Ministers ever came to living here was when they attended Federal Parliament, and we all know that is not living in the ACT as the residents know it.
I would be the last to say that our public servants have not done a very good job; they have. The more I work with them the more I see the load they had to carry. I appreciate just how committed they were to the Territory. However, I am sure they are very happy to give up a lot of the decision making they were called upon to do and now become our advisers. Federal Ministers in the past have not only had the ACT as a single portfolio but also had other areas of responsibility covering the rest of Australia, leaving us the poorer.
In the case of the Fraser Government, I happen to know that members of the Liberal Party in the ACT called upon the Minister and told him that, if the big house on the hill was not built, the party might not have won the Senate seat at the next election. At the time, Canberra was in the middle of the biggest slump and needed an injection of a great amount of money to pull it out of the mess. We all now know how the construction of this great building made Canberra go ahead. It was the local people who took the initiative in going to the Prime Minister - the ones who live and work here and who want to ensure that we all have a future.
Of course, with the coming of the Hawke Government, we saw self-government become a reality - something which had been on the local agenda since the early 1950s.
Today, we sit in this Assembly, duly elected by our fellow Canberrans who know that they now have a say in how they are governed. This is a true democracy.
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