Page 2547 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 15 November 1989
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involvement in a further, related committee as compromising. Ergo, we are left with Mr Collaery. But what are we to do with him? It is as contemptuous of the committee system as anything else suggested in Mr Jensen's motion that this particular committee should be asked to shuffle its membership now. That promotes the view that the committee's activities are of such insignificance they can be disrupted whenever the Rally feels like it. We are referring to select committees. More importantly it will set a precedent allowing select committees to be tampered with at the whim of a majority in the Assembly.
A select committee, once constituted, I believe ought be allowed to do its job. However, in the interests of harmony in the Assembly and in the unusual circumstances, of which I have certainly been a major part, I am prepared to suggest an amendment to the motion allowing the committee to be expanded to include Mr Collaery as a member. I urge members to reject Mr Jensen's motion, trailing, as it does, a contempt for all the values which members like Mr Kaine and Mr Duby have spoken about so earnestly in the past. I urge them instead to approve my amendment. I move:
That all words after "That" be omitted and the following words substituted: "paragraph (3) of the resolution of appointment of the Select Committee on Cultural Activities be amended by inserting after 'Mr Humphries' the following words 'Mr Collaery,'.".
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.10): I will be quite brief and I will speak to both the amendment and the motion. During Mr Moore's long tirade against the Residents Rally, during which I insisted on several occasions that I was not interested in it and I did not want to hear it, he did make one comment. It was a rhetorical question, in fact, but he obviously did not want it answered. His question was, "Is the committee system to be tampered with at the whim of an individual member?", and the answer, Mr Speaker, is no. That is why I support the Residents Rally's original motion and that is why I will vote against Mr Moore's amendment to it.
We have a standing order, Mr Speaker, standing order 221, which says:
Membership of committees shall be composed of representatives of all groups and parties in the Assembly as nearly as practicable proportional to their representation in the Assembly.
We have stuck with that from the very outset, and that means that an individual member is entitled to approximately one-seventeenth of the seats on committees. Mr Stevenson has had to live with that, and I submit that Mr Moore will have to live with that. He was not elected to this committee as an independent; he was elected there
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