Page 3113 - Week 14 - Thursday, 7 December 1989
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opposition. There was no consultation with Michael Moore, because I did take the trouble to ask Michael whether there had been any consultation with him about this order of business. I asked Rosemary Follett, the leader of the Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, whether she had been consulted by the Government in relation to this business paper or indeed in relation to the notice paper, which contains many important items of business. But no approach was made.
So here we have a complete abandonment of the great and longstanding traditions of this Assembly, where consultation between all members of the Assembly was a point on which the whole operation of the Assembly turned, Mr Speaker. But now we see that practice abandoned. Did Mr Kaine approach us at all and say, "Well, what we would like to do is abandon question time, abandon the opportunity for matters of public importance and abandon private members business"? All he had to do was come and tell us that that was his intention. Instead, he sneaked up on us here in the chamber and we were completely unprepared for this ambush that they perpetrated. They arrived here and indicated quite clearly their intention to deny the people of Canberra democracy, to deny democracy to the members here, who have been elected by the community of Canberra and who legitimately represent the interests of the people of Canberra.
They did not tell us. They tried to spring an ambush on us. They want to close this place down; they want to deny access to the press; they want to deny access by us to their conduct of government business; they do not wish to be the subject of scrutiny. That makes me wonder what the sitting pattern for next year will be, Mr Speaker. It is relevant to this particular motion, of course, as under this proposal we will sit on Thursday of next week, but how often do you think we will sit next year? How often do you think we will sit next year if this is the tradition which is being created as a result of this sort of motion and as a result of the behaviour of the Government here this morning? They will not let us come together.
I predict now that they will try to have the Assembly sit as infrequently as possible. I suggest that, say, for the first six months of the new year, they will try to introduce a pattern whereby we sit once every four weeks, or something like that, or once every eight weeks even, just in order to meet the statutory requirements. This is the way they will operate because they are not game to subject themselves to scrutiny.
They have denied us question time; they have denied us MPI time; they have denied us the opportunity to raise private members' business. I predict that next year we will see the sort of pattern that Bjelke-Petersen had in Queensland. Now, Joh used to sit about two or three weeks a year. There were periods of months - - -
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