Page 4132 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 October 1991
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parliament and who is faced in a parliament by an alternative government. I will come back to that in a moment. The institution of opposition leader, therefore, is very much a parliamentary one. It is one of long lineage - at least 100 years in this country and I suspect much longer than that in the United Kingdom and elsewhere - and it therefore has a number of features that would be very difficult to separate from our present form of government in the ACT.
Obviously, certain accoutrements go with the role of opposition leader, and in this case those accoutrements relate particularly to staff. Those accoutrements allow a focus on the role of that position, and in particular on the opposition that that position represents to the government's policies and practices between elections. An opposition is vitally important in order to keep a government on its toes. As far as possible, it is in the interests of the community to have opposition focused and speaking if not with one voice then at least with a certain amount of authority because it represents a particular position within the ACT or within a particular parliament. The point I make is that there is value in having a single or primary spokesman for those opposed to the government rather than have that role spread out among a number of people in a parliament.
The fact that in any parliament there are minor parties, and there are a number of such parliaments today in this country, means that what was once an exclusive right is no longer exclusive; that is, it is shared among a number of organisations and parties. Whether that is good or bad remains to be seen. I suspect that the ACT has provided the only example in Australian history of minor parties participating in direct government. Our constituency and others will have a chance to judge that experiment when the time comes. In our case, it will be in February. The point, of course, is that the primary role traditionally has been of an opposition.
I emphasise that there is a misconception held by some people in this house. The opposition is not those members who are not in government. That is not formally the opposition. The opposition is the largest party not in government. Whether that is an appropriate way of choosing an opposition or not I do not comment on, but I do say that it is the traditional way. It is the way in which oppositions have been designated for many years. There have been exceptions. For example, there was an occasion in the 1940s when the Leader of the National Party was the Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament, for some reason which I do not have at hand.
Mr Berry: Who was it?
Mrs Nolan: It was Page.
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