Page 1047 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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were often meeting on weekends. I am sure that this is the experience of all of us on our various committees, that political loyalties are not ignored but are often put into a better context of carrying out the tasks at hand. The committee work of this Assembly is among the most important work we do.
The three of us did not come to this inquiry with preconceived conclusions, no matter what positions we may have taken earlier, before we had studied the matters before us. Each one of us learned a great deal, including discovering far more than we had previously known about institutions with which we thought we were already familiar. I particularly remember the occasion at the Australian Defence Force Academy when Mr Humphries, to his own surprise, was called on to make a comment to our most generous hosts. He said, at a moment's notice, that seeing the academy was like discovering a room in one's own house that one did not know existed, a room full of good things. Indeed, our city has many fine rooms.
The three of us came to appreciate the great range of subjects, disciplines, research projects, teaching programs, resources and expertise within the four walls of the ACT. We especially came to understand the range of excellence in the academic, scholarly and educational life of our city. We saw, at first hand, one kind of excellence in advanced research, and may I stress that it was not only in the Institute of Advanced Studies where you would expect it but in all of the institutions we visited. We saw another kind of excellence in the enthusiasm for a variety of educational enterprises involving teaching and research, sometimes stretching over institutional boundaries, as in the case of the earth and environmental sciences, both in the ANU and the CCAE.
During the time of our inquiry we had the pleasure of attending concerts by the Canberra Youth Orchestra and the Canberra Symphony, areas of excellence related in large part to the School of Music. We literally saw visual excellence not only, as you would expect, at the School of Art, but at the ANU and at the CCAE, and indeed at ADFA, as I recall. At the CCAE we watched the careful repair of damaged works of art. We need to foster all those many diverse excellences within the most appropriate and best possible institutional and administrative framework.
Before coming to our specific conclusions, I would like to thank not only my Assembly colleagues, but also the devoted, hardworking small staff which made this report possible. First Mrs Beth Young, who was right there at the beginning and right there at the end, correcting little faults; our secretary, Ms Cheryl Scarlett, who wrote most of the report and saw it through every stage, including that panic period last night when yet again the computer was user unfriendly - that was good team work last night, thank you all - and also John Cummins for his wise advice as the rest of us tackled a task with which we were
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