Page 1295 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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However, considering the information put before it, the committee accepts the view that the granting of the form of body politic we now have was the most appropriate in the circumstances and provides the ACT with the widest range of options within which the ACT community can design a system which best suits the unique nature of our circumstances. The committee was of the view that, while the ACT can never expect or indeed want to become a State, the city-state model is appropriate and there is no justification for the separation of the State and local or municipal responsibilities because we are an integrated urban community. We should retain the present single tier of government in the ACT.
We considered various models of government that might be appropriate, including the present system, which includes the parliamentary committee process, and a proposal for an executive committee system. We considered that the current system of executive government with a parliamentary committee system was the most appropriate at this early stage of our development.
I may be a bit of a conservative on this. However, if the outcry against the "Machiavellian modified d'Hondt electoral system", as one witness called it, is anything to go by, it is probably better to stick to the devil we know rather than experiment with a system of government not used anywhere else in Australia.
This brings me on to the size of the present Assembly. It is clear, when one takes into account the lack of municipal or council representatives for municipal matters, that we are, in fact, under-represented. The current size of the Assembly is considered to be appropriate with current workloads, especially when one considers the amount of committee work undertaken by non-executive members. I personally believe that any less would not be in the interests of good government in the ACT as we struggle to pick up the threads of an administration which, by its very nature, had difficulty in gaining any priority in having matters considered by Cabinet. At least our Cabinet or Executive has sole responsibility for ACT matters and Ministers do not have to compete with pressing issues of national importance when they want to bring a matter before it. I am sure that this important change will be appreciated even more by the residents of the ACT in the future.
The committee was strongly of the view that the job is a full-time one and felt that there can only be rigorous and comprehensive scrutiny of the effectiveness and integrity of the administration of the ACT by a parliament with sufficient time and resources. However, your committee did make one important recommendation in this area. That was that any decision to increase the size of the Assembly and the Executive should be the responsibility of the Assembly. The current system, while allowing the Assembly to pass
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