Page 2915 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 September 1994
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This Government's approach, as exhibited in this document, is a lazy, even a hazy, approach to consultation. Let me quote what one community group said about this document:
It is a shallow and disappointing document, completely failing to address a number of important matters, and being couched in such generalities that accountability would always be easy to evade. Repetitions and padding within the 18 or so printed pages do not inspire great public confidence in this exercise, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating after all the essential revisions have been attended to.
A great many are referred to in that submission. This document proves, frankly, that the Government's response to the consultation challenge is a ponderously bureaucratic one and one that contains no indicators whatsoever, no sharp edges on which the Government might be caught, whereby it can determine its successes and, of course, its failures.
This is a pre-election gimmick, from a Government which, given its record, should not even dare to talk about community consultation in this place. Its record shows that it listens only to groups whom it wants to hear, and simply makes the same decisions as it would have made anyway. We have not seen any evidence at all in this place, Madam Speaker, that this Government has ever changed its mind once on the basis of community consultation, but we have seen plenty of examples of where the Government has refused to do so in the light of extremely great community pressure. The paper is mixed together, like food in a blender, by the Chief Minister's own department. Yet, in exhibiting a token commitment to asking the community its views, it did not even bother to ask other departments and agencies within her own Government about the policy, about the document.
We had a call, Madam Speaker, from a particular agency bureaucrat a day after this document was launched, saying, "By the way, we in this department, department X, know nothing about this document; it is news to us. This is a framework in which we have to work; we have never seen it before". That is the level of consultation this Government manages to achieve. Madam Speaker, why does it take a Government green paper, three years in preparation, to make the point that you should listen to groups and individuals who are affected by Government decisions? Basically, that is all this document does. You could summarise it in one paragraph.
We have to work out better ways of listening to people, and that is about it. I remember that Ian Warden in the 1989 election had what I think he called a promisometer that he would pass over documents to pick up matters of substance in them. I can assure you he still has it. He should run it over this thing, and he would see absolutely nothing. Let us look at the document itself.
Mr Kaine: A zero reading; in fact, it will probably zap down into the negative.
MR HUMPHRIES: I reckon that it would.
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