Page 1360 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 1993
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I leave with members what such a regime might mean for the people of the ACT. There are other lord mayors mentioned in this article who are voluntary. Of course, a voluntary position like that is open only to people who do not need to earn a living. I consider that kind of an arrangement to be totally undemocratic. We also have one of the lord mayors, Mr Reg Withers, whom some members may remember as the toe cutter, referred to by one of his colleagues, affectionately we are told, as "a jovial, scheming bastard". That was said by one of his friends.
So, Madam Speaker, I submit that Mr Stevenson had a duty to this Assembly to tell us what he meant. For all I know, the extent of Mr Stevenson's reforms, the extent perhaps of Mrs Carnell's reforms, would be simply to replace the title of the Legislative Assembly with the ACT or Canberra City Council, and substitute the title of Chief Minister for Lord Mayor. This may be merely a PR exercise, but I would put it to you that it is, certainly from Mr Stevenson and from Mrs Carnell, no more than a vote grabber. Madam Speaker, because I have had some four years' experience of Mr Stevenson's modus operandi, I would expect his proposal to be somewhat more radical than merely a change of name, but the terms of his motion and his argument for it certainly do not reveal any of that detail. I would like to ask what Mr Stevenson proposes to do with our health services, or with our education system, or with our police force and with the judiciary. Perhaps Mr Stevenson proposes that New South Wales should run our health and education systems, and perhaps Queensland might want to run our police force, or could we put it out to private tender? Madam Speaker, we really have no idea what this proposal by Mr Stevenson is about.
I think we should remember that in 1988 the Commonwealth, through the self-government package that was enacted - that package runs to well over 100 pages - conferred upon the ACT a complete system of government with very well-defined structures, institutions and processes. What Mr Stevenson and Mrs Carnell propose to do is to replace that and to hand back to the people of the Territory a five-word mandate; just five words - a city council and a lord mayor. The proposition, Madam Speaker, is at best half-baked and ill considered, and at worst, I believe, is yet another attempt to destabilise this Territory.
The Leader of the Opposition's contribution to date has also been half-baked but with, in my view, an additional and cynical overlay. As the Canberra Times has actually put it today, Mrs Carnell is seeking to mine the populist vein of vague dissatisfaction with self-government but without proposing a real alternative. From what I have heard and seen of Mrs Carnell's utterances, she would apparently have us retain most of our State-type functions, although, of course, that is far from clear. I would be very interested to hear the detail of the Leader of the Opposition's proposals. What would she, for instance, have us do with health, education, police services and the judiciary? To say that this would be determined following community consultation is simply not good enough. The community is entitled to know what it is that Mrs Carnell has in mind and what her alternative model is, even in its basic form.
Mr Kaine: Tell us about your budget, Rosemary.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Kaine, the former Leader of the Opposition, still the only Liberal with any commonsense, in my view, in some comments that he has made has rightly pointed out the vast flaws in his current leader's inanities on this subject. Mr Kaine was heard to say this morning:
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