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MR KAINE (11.25): I will be brief; time is at a premium today. As chairman of the Tourism Committee, I support the amendment put forward by Mr Moore. I am a little disappointed that Ms Tucker is removing science and technology. I am not going to fight about it today either; but I would think that the exploitation of science and technology in Canberra was very much a part of the economic development process, and to exclude it seems a little odd. I do not know which committee, other than this one retitled, would be better qualified to deal with it. However, we can leave that for future debate.

I support this motion because, in my view, the workload as between some of the committees has been quite out of balance. It always seemed strange to me that we had one committee, the Tourism Committee, with very narrow terms of reference, while all the others had wide-ranging terms of reference that resulted in a considerably greater workload. Looking at the Planning and Environment Committee, it has been pretty obvious for six years that these two issues loom large in people's minds in Canberra, and the Planning Committee in its various forms has always been a very busy committee and a very productive committee. Its workload has always been enormous, relative even to some of the other committees. To transfer some of its responsibility to the Tourism Committee, whose workload, I suspect, has been a little light on, I think is a sensible thing to do. The Tourism Committee has the capacity to take on additional work and, as Mr De Domenico mentioned, it allows me to continue to take an active interest in a subject in which I have had a long and abiding interest, that is, regional development.

Briefly, in connection with the reference to the division of the Planning and Environment Committee, I suspect that we need to be a bit careful about that. It is the very physical development of this city that impacts on the environment. I would have thought that the people who are interested in the environment as a particular subject would be better able to influence outcomes by being a part of the planning process, through the Planning and Environment Committee, than by separating themselves out and taking a different view and being removed from what goes on in the Planning Committee. It seems to me that the two subjects are highly interrelated and they should stay together; but that is obviously a matter for later debate.

There is one other matter I want to comment on. I understood Mr Berry to make some comment about people being excluded from the committee process, saying that you could not operate effectively by a process of exclusion. In my experience, after six years as a member of this Assembly, and having spent a lot of time on committees and chairing them, there has to be a process of exclusion because the alternative is for all of the non-Executive members to sit on all committees. Our committees are designed to best utilise the abilities and the time and energy of the non-Executive members, with a limited number of people on each. That in itself is a process of exclusion because not everybody can sit on every committee, and it would be an absurdity to suggest that they can. I have a hard time, as it is, keeping up with attending committee meetings and involving myself in all of the processes of those committees of which I am a member. If I were expected to be on every committee to guarantee that I was not excluded from anything, it would be beyond my capability, and I suggest that it would be beyond the capability of most members of this Assembly. I do not quite understand what point Mr Berry was trying to make when he talked about a process of exclusion.

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