Page 1944 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 May 1991
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But the lines are clear and distinct. Mr Jensen, who is to speak shortly, I expect, may tell us about all those messages that he carries backwards and forwards between his Chief Minister and the department or the Law Office or wherever consultation is done. In the first debate I said that the answer was simply a shuffling of chairs. The point was made today that Mr Jensen and Mr Stefaniak should swap committees. It would be as simple as that, and we would have no objection at all to that. I understand that the proposition has been put. I do not know why it has not been accepted - perhaps out of perversity that they will not accommodate suggestions from elsewhere - but that would be a very simple solution. We would have confidence in those chairpersons who are not so intimately involved with what is happening with that planning legislation. That is clearly the way it should have gone.
I recognise now that the intensity of the debate is such that the Government will find it very, very difficult to accede to that very sensible proposal. That is regrettable. I think you gain in stature only when you acknowledge that the path that you are on is not the best and you accommodate some change. That is the way this Government should go. While these Executive Deputies are not successful in the way they are operating, they preclude any deputy from serving on a related committee.
MR JENSEN (3.48): Mr Deputy Speaker, in rising to comment on the remarks that have been made by those opposite today, I wish to take Mr Moore back to a period in excess of two years ago when he was still in the Residents Rally and we were developing policies in relation to the role that we saw for a changing Assembly, a new style of operation for assemblies because of this new opportunity that had been offered to us by the latest, and probably the last, legislative body to be formed in the Australian political sphere.
At that time the suggestion was that a Brisbane City Council style of committee system and operation might be the way to go for the ACT. Members opposite and other members of the Assembly may recall that recently that issue has once again been raised in the media for discussion.
Also you may recall that, while we were waiting for the votes to be counted prior to the commencement of the Assembly, there was a suggestion, which was supported by the Residents Rally and also by Mr Kaine as the leader of the Liberal Party, that one of the options that we might consider, because there was not a clear majority within the Assembly, was the possibility that there would be a representative from each of the major groups participating in the executive role of government. But we all know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that that did not really get off the ground because the Labor Party, in its commitment to its nature of operations, its total control of the Executive, was not prepared to adopt that role.
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