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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (26 March) . . Page.. 612 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (11.32), in reply: Mr Speaker, the report was designed to raise questions and to stimulate debate. To some extent it has achieved that. It certainly has out there in the community, and we are getting some extremely interesting - - -

Mr Berry: I have never heard anybody talking about it.

MRS CARNELL: That is fascinating, Mr Berry. There are some very interesting responses from community councils and others. I am fascinated that, in an Assembly that talks an awful lot about community consultation, all of a sudden - - -

Ms McRae: No; you do.

MRS CARNELL: No; everybody here does. Everybody here is renowned for doing that. A document has been put together, certainly not by the Government but by a group at arm's length from the Government, to stimulate debate and to achieve some sort of broad community consultation on this issue. If community consultation is about coming back to the Assembly first off, up front, with a series of recommendations on how we believe it should happen, when we have done that in the past it has been regarded by those opposite as circumventing the capacity of the community to determine what the outcome is.

It strikes me that in issues like this, where we desperately need to get community involvement, community consensus and Assembly consensus, the appropriate way to go is to come forward with a report that does not make any absolute recommendations but says, "Here are some of the issues that the advisory group believes should be addressed - not all of the issues, no actual recommendations. Now let us see whether there is a better way to do this". I believe that there is. I believe that there has to be a better way to run government in the ACT than simply to lift an approach to government that exists in much bigger parliaments around Australia and overseas. I do not necessarily expect those opposite to agree with me, but I am interested that in the last sitting, when this report was tabled, Mr Berry and Mr Moore made some very definite criticisms of the report. So be it; that is fine. But neither of them has bothered putting forward a submission or any recommendations or any approach.

Mr Moore: It is pathetic, Kate. They got even the fundamentals wrong.

MRS CARNELL: Mr Moore makes the comment that it is fundamentally wrong. He should tell us what he believes is the way forward for improving the way that we govern the ACT - to become more consultative, to become less adversarial, to become more holistic in our approach? One of the basic issues that they looked at was how you could make sure that 17 people had input into the direction of government in the ACT, not just the Executive, which inevitably happens in an executive form of government. Whether they got it right or wrong is not the issue here. The issue is that we as an Assembly should and must be looking at this issue. It is something that, certainly from our perspective, needs to happen.

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