Page 1346 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 1993
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Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ...
It refers to an indissoluble Federal Commonwealth - and we hear talk about the sovereignty of the ACT. The Federal Government necessarily maintains some functions. A more exact way of putting it is that the ACT is now a colony of the Commonwealth Parliament. Consequently, the Legislative Assembly is a sham colonial legislature. Much more genuine self-government could be exercised by Canberra citizens through their four Federal members, but only if they were compelled to accept responsibility for the State-like functions of health, education and policing when they are taken back by the Commonwealth Parliament. The Canberra city council and lord mayor would have a much smaller ACT only bureaucracy, though the ACT citizens would probably have to pay tax for health, education and police services.
Madam Speaker, the Berlin wall came down; the Baltic nations were freed; the USSR is dissolved. Can self-government be abolished and replaced with a sensible Canberra city council? Of course. Behind these changes were people - not people who said that it could not happen, but people who said that it could and who made it happen. Our sham self-government, our bogus self-government, is not an immutable law. The only immutable law is that politicians will not be accountable until the people hold them to be or until we elect representatives who see themselves as servants of the electorate, not its masters.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (12.26): Madam Speaker, I would refer Mr Stevenson, amongst others, to the terms of his motion - which, as I said earlier, commits him to try to persuade us of the merits of a city council and a lord mayor. I think it is now on the record that during the very extended period of speaking by Mr Stevenson he mentioned the lord mayor not once and the city council hardly ever - very seldom. This should not surprise people, Madam Speaker, because at the very start of his remarks Mr Stevenson informed us that he would be speaking to three topics - firstly, should self-government be abolished; secondly, should it be replaced with a council; and, thirdly, could that be achieved?
The fact of the matter is that he spoke to none of those topics. All we heard was his usual misleading and entirely rhetorical diatribe against self-government. I do not know to whom he thinks he is appealing. Madam Speaker, it seems to me that a great deal of what Mr Stevenson said was, in fact, an argument for self-government. Mr Stevenson refreshed our memories about the referendum of 1978. Those of us who were residents and took part in that referendum - and Mr Stevenson was not one of them - well recall the result. But the most overwhelming impression that I had of that referendum process, Madam Speaker, was that it was conducted by the Commonwealth and that the results of it were completely ignored by the Commonwealth. History has told us that. History has made it very clear that the wish expressed by the great majority of Canberra residents, which was to maintain the status quo with the advisory council arrangement that was in place, was simply not abided by.
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