Page 1362 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 1993
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participation are very real, as Mr Kaine knows. Developments include things like the mutual recognition of goods and occupations, national road and rail reform, and the work that is being undertaken towards a national electricity grid for south-eastern Australia. All of these developments will have important and, in my view, positive effects for this Territory. Yet, Mr Stevenson and Mrs Carnell, of course, would wish us not even to be in attendance at those forums.
Other issues which have been considered, and in some instances still are being considered, by heads of government, such as national ecologically sustainable development and greenhouse strategies, as well as social justice matters such as the national strategy on violence against women, will also have positive implications for the ACT, and we ought to be full partners in that debate. Mr Stevenson, and apparently Mrs Carnell, would consign the ACT to a position of a local council where our capacity to influence matters that directly affect this Territory is removed. I would like to reiterate the Government's opposition to this motion. (Extension of time granted)
I thank members. I will not be much longer. I reiterate the Government's opposition to this motion because it is flawed and I believe that the philosophy behind the motion is ill considered, and that is being generous towards it. Madam Speaker, I said at the outset that Mr Stevenson had not even attempted to debate the full extent of his motion, and I would like to repeat that. Mr Stevenson has not given us the slightest hint of what it is that he means by a council. He could well mean 26 members, as for Brisbane. After all, our budget is bigger than theirs, so maybe he means more than 26 members. He may well mean that the lord mayor should earn more than the lord mayor of Brisbane because of greater responsibilities. We would have no idea what his intentions are. Madam Speaker, we have no idea what the role of the lord mayor is; how the lord mayor, as proposed by Mr Stevenson, would be elected; or whether the lord mayor would be, as one of the lord mayors in the Bulletin article is described, a benevolent dictator - just a benevolent dictator. I believe that Mr Stevenson would really have us put back in time to the situation where the Commonwealth, through a Minister not elected by the people of this Territory, did in fact perform as a benevolent dictator. Well, on the good days it was benevolent.
Nevertheless, I think that we in this chamber must uphold the principles of democracy. We heard Mr Stevenson saying yesterday in the debate on the boxing legislation that he believed that it was inappropriate for the people of the Territory to have to abide by the laws of another State; yet he is telling us today that in major areas, for instance, health, education and policing, he would be quite happy to hand over the control of those issues to some other body, but he has not even told us who. It is possible that he may wish them to be run as a profit making exercise. It is possible that he may want to hand over matters to do with planning and land development to private enterprise. He has not said.
Madam Speaker, I believe that the motion that is before us is pure electioneering from Mr Stevenson. I think it is somewhat insulting not just to this chamber but to the people of the Territory as well to have such a half-baked proposition put before them when in fact such a proposition would affect every citizen of this Territory, would affect the decisions that are made over some of the most important areas of their lives. The proposition put by Mr Stevenson deserves to fail. The half-baked suggestions made by Mrs Carnell also deserve to fail,
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