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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (21 February) . . Page.. 130 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I was particularly disappointed in the community representative I heard on radio saying, "We have to make improvements so that people can actually come and appear before the committees". People appear before committees day after day. An example that immediately springs to my mind is an individual who requested her third appearance before the Planning and Environment Committee, which of course we facilitated. That was on a single issue. The Chief Minister claimed in her speech that this report was compiled by a broad cross-section of skilled individuals. When I read the names and the qualifications of those people, I accept that. What went wrong with this group of people who sat down to do this task? I would suggest to you, Chief Minister, that the task that it was asked to do, as set out on page 3 under the heading "The Task", may have been part of the problem; but perhaps the real goals, the real underlying issue about making it look that we were doing something about council-style government, may well have been part of the problem also.

Another issue needs to be settled. Often when people talk about non-adversarial systems in which people work together, they use as examples American-style systems and the fact that although people may be Republicans or Democrats they vote according to their own wishes and therefore do not work in an adversarial system. In fact, although an adversarial system may not develop across the floor of the house as it does in the Westminster system, an adversarial system develops between the Executive - in that case, the directly elected government - and the representatives. There is a significant adversarial system, as we certainly saw with President Clinton and his budget a little while ago. This whole concept of council-style government, this whole concept of "Let us not have an adversarial system", is nonsense. It is just a little bit of toadying to the community to get them on side by making the right noises. That is all it is. It is a pretence.

Then we go to the notion of a greater role for all Assembly members in the decision-making processes of government through a revised Assembly committee system. The proposal, as far as I am concerned, diminishes the role of the Assembly committees, diminishes the roles of members of the backbenches and crossbenches and increases the role of the Executive. It centralises power. This document is all about the centralisation of power, not about spreading power and involving other people in decisions. I mentioned the direct input of the community. Mr Speaker, the Chief Minister in reading her speech said:

I am sure that some of us prefer the adversarial system we have now.

She then made a Freudian slip. She said that absolutely everything is "negated", when the word written in her speech is "negotiated". We all make slips like that. I am not having a shot at her for making a slip. However, this one was particularly interesting because, for her, exactly the opposite has happened. Although there has been an adversarial system, many issues that she has brought to the Assembly have been negotiated; they have not been negated, although some of them have been. I think it is very important for us to say that in our adversarial system here everything is negotiated. In other words, everything before this Assembly is up for grabs. Every single decision of the Executive is reviewed through the Assembly committees and through the Assembly itself.

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