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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (21 February) . . Page.. 129 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

committee's task was - in any event - flawed from the beginning by the notion that what Canberra needed was a more city-council style of government.

In other words, this was just a sop given as an electoral ploy, and the report ought to have been thrown away. We all knew last year that the talk about a city council style of government was an electoral ploy. It sounded great, but really that is what it was. We all knew it. You should have just let it go. The editorial continues:

Mercifully, that idea scarcely got a mention -

at least some sense prevailed -

by the time the committee got to drafting its report: the focus, rather, is on making the ACT Government more accessible to the community and more participatory in style.

The first question about this draft is: Who was involved and who was consulted? The Chief Minister has shared with us the names of the people who were involved. I find it particularly interesting that the report reveals that none of them have a good understanding of how the Assembly actually operates and how the committees actually operate. They recommend that to allow the community to come and talk to committees the committees should do something they have been doing for seven years. If there were something new in the report, we might achieve something. However, it reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of how this Assembly operates. That is no clearer, Mr Speaker, than on page 13, where there is a very confused diagram about where the Cabinet fits into government and the Assembly and where the committees operate. Quite clearly, the role of the Legislative Assembly pales into the background.

The report is fundamentally flawed. It proposes that Assembly committees match agencies. That recommendation may be worth looking at. I think that it will not achieve what people are trying to achieve. It will just make the committees reactive to government rather than proactive. The report is fundamentally flawed, as was the speech just made by Mrs Carnell. The best part - and thank you for distributing it to us so that we have it in writing - is the sentence that reads:

... it is difficult to run a full-scale parliament with just 17 members, even if there were a majority party of eight.

Eight and eight make 16. That does not quite make a majority. Mrs Carnell, I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand the numbers. That typifies the fundamental flaws in this document. Whoever drafted it not only had a very poor understanding of the relationship between the legislature and the Executive but also failed to come and ask us about it. It is an issue that I am delighted to talk about. It is an issue that many of us are delighted to talk about. I spend a great deal of time talking to academics and students about it, yet this high-flying group were not prepared to talk to us.

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