Page 4948 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 11 December 1990
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this particular motion. We have lost a great deal of dignity in this Assembly because of your ignorance, and because of your contempt for what should be a genuine parliamentary system. You do not know about it and you have messed it up, I regret, very greatly.
MR STEFANIAK (4.29): Mr Speaker, I do not think I have heard so much drivel for quite some time. This motion, supposedly on the failure of the Government and the Speaker to maintain the dignity of the Assembly, is really a waste of a matter of public importance because it totally misses the point. Let us get a few things - - -
Mr Wood: I was not blaming you. You were one of the more innocent.
MR STEFANIAK: Let us get a few things in perspective, Mr Wood. This matter on 29 November, which the Opposition are harping about here today, came on during the adjournment debate - a debate that is meant to go for 30 minutes at the end of the business of the day and in which members can get up and talk on anything. There were talks of various deals to ensure that nothing would go wrong between various members of this house, and reference has been made to them today. Indeed, nothing should have gone wrong, because the adjournment debate is not the place for people to pull stupid little tricks - like trying to bring on private members' business at an inopportune time - because that does, in fact, lower the dignity of the Assembly. It is a debate at the end of the day for members to raise any sort of matter they want to, and it is meant to go for 30 minutes.
I think it is about time that we in this place all grew up a little bit. Let us look at what happens in other parliaments. Mr Wood spoke - I am looking at what happens in other parliaments - of pairs. I have had a number of conversations with other members of the Government and we would be absolutely delighted if we could get pairs. It was pleasing to see - and I hope we can do it fairly soon - that in recent weeks members of the Labor Party are finally starting to take a little bit of notice and they agree that we can arrange to have some sort of pairing arrangement at least with them.
We are now a couple of weeks off Christmas 1990; this Assembly has now been going for about 19 months and we still do not have the pairing relationship. I think that is quite ridiculous and I would stress to the Opposition that its members pull their fingers out and let us get some sort of arrangement going so that we can start looking like other parliaments.
Mr Wood then mentioned, as his second point, the Government creating a kind of a crisis. What crisis did the Government create? It takes two to tango. As Mr Wood has pointed out, two members of the Government were off on business: one on Assembly business, Mrs Nolan, the
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