Page 2304 - Week 08 - Friday, 21 June 1991
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were Dubbo or Bega or Tumut, and the excellence of your education and health systems would rapidly be degraded because the outcomes would be determined by some public servants in Sydney rather than public servants right here.
So, do not talk to me about municipal government. I do not believe that that is what this community wants. They want a system that appears to them to be more responsive to their needs. And they use the words "consultative" and "cooperative". I believe that we could evolve and develop a cooperative, consultative form of government that is not municipal government but would be seen by the community to be satisfying their needs and could still cope with the heavy workload and the demands of health, education, the police, the court systems and all those other things.
I think that we were set on the wrong track by the kind of legislation that the Commonwealth put in place which, in a way, tended to dictate this form of government that we have sitting here now. We have tried the experiment; we have found that it is difficult to make it work; we have found that the community at large has a sense of dissatisfaction with it. And very often they cannot identify what their dissatisfaction is based on. They just know that they are dissatisfied and they do not really like it. To that extent, there is merit in Mr Stevenson's motion in that it is time that we did some navel gazing, looked at ourselves, looked at this organisation that we, in a way, have created and asked ourselves: How can we make it work better in the interests of the community?
I believe that it can be made better; I think we all do. But I do not believe that it means reverting to a municipal government, and I do not believe that it is the wish of the community that we revert to a municipal government when you come down to it, because they like the idea of having people here who are responsible for health and education. I think that they would be aghast at the notion of handing the responsibility for those functions over to the State Government of New South Wales, or even their reverting to the Commonwealth. They want people here who are accountable to them to administer those functions. A municipal government cannot do it. A municipal government simply does not encompass that kind of activity.
So, I do not disagree in general principle with the type of proposition that Mr Stevenson is putting forward, but I think that the model that he is proposing is perhaps the wrong one. Perhaps it is time for the Assembly to establish a select committee or something to look at the issue. I think that, if Mr Stevenson - who accuses the Assembly, the Chief Minister and others of rhetoric and making long speeches - were to put forward a motion instead of making a long speech himself, he might get some more positive results.
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