Page 895 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 1990
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. the existing structure of Standing Committees be retained;
. the membership of the Standing Committee on Conservation, Heritage and Environment be increased from three to four;
. a Standing Committee on Legal Affairs be established with the power to initiate its own inquiries and with a membership of three;
. the responsibilities of the Standing Committees be as listed in Table 3 to this report; and
. a fourth Committee Secretary position be created and the new position be funded by the abolition of a Research Officer position and an Administrative Support position within the Committee Office.
I think that the last is certainly important, as has already been mentioned by other speakers. We are not looking to create any additional funding positions; the position of committee secretary for the new committee would, in fact, be funded from within its own allocation.
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (4.55): I apologise to the Chief Minister if I have beaten him to the gun, but I think this is a very important report and something which requires participation by all members of the Assembly. This report is probably one of the most important reports that will be coming down in these early days of the operations of the Assembly. I think it is most important that we should all address the issues that have been raised in it, and also make some comments on the recommendations and the general issues raised in that report.
When discussing any matter in relation to anything to do with committees within the operations of this Assembly, I think it should be borne out as to what an important job committees do, given the size of our Assembly and the fact that there are only a limited number of hours in the day and the fact that we only have 17 members of the Assembly. There is also the fact that four of us are in the Executive. You, yourself, Mr Speaker, are only eligible to be a member of one committee, that of the Administration and Procedures Committee. That really means that there are only 12 members of this Assembly available to perform committee duties.
Given the wide range of issues that the Assembly addresses, I think this indicates the enormous workload that is placed on members of this Assembly in adequately performing their duties on committees. Time taken up in formal meetings of committees can be quite arduous. I know myself from the experiences that I had when I was a member of a number of committees in this Assembly last year prior to being a member of the Executive, the time factor that is involved
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