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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (26 March) . . Page.. 613 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

The report is available for public comment until 10 May 1996. The Chief Minister's Department is bringing together all of those comments. I will be very pleased to bring forward those comments to this Assembly. Public notices have been placed in the Canberra Times and in the Chronicle. Copies of the report have been made available at all Canberra libraries and ACT shopfronts. The report has been mailed out to various community, business and other interest groups. Those opposite say that it is a waste of time. Mr Moore says that it is wrong. Let us make sure that the views of all of us here and all of those community groups are brought forward.

All those opposite whinge about it. The Greens whinge about it. Mr Moore has been known to whinge about the Assembly not working as well as it could. Here is an opportunity to make it work better, to open the processes of this Assembly in a transparent way to the community and to non-Executive members. I believe that that is worth looking at. I do not believe that this report even attempts to bring forward the answers; nor should a community consultation approach. If community consultation was about the Government coming up with a fait accompli and then putting the fait accompli out to the community for comment, that does not give the community any capacity for input into the final product.

We have been criticised in the past for taking that sort of approach. Here we have taken the exact opposite approach and come up with a set of things that we could potentially talk about in this area - some of the ideas are very good; some of them are not so good - to talk about to the community. The Assembly can be part of that approach, building up an approach where we can be unique in Australia and have a style of government that is what the community is after. If those opposite believe that the community is after adversarial government that is based upon an Executive totally, then they are wrong. I think the election over 12 months ago showed categorically that the community does believe that that approach for the ACT is wrong.

What we are attempting to do here is to overcome those problems in a consultative manner. It will be interesting to see what comes forward from community councils and from others, to see what people really think. Maybe what they think is that it is just too hard. But already, according to the people who have spoken to me about this report and about the issues generally, there are some very smart ideas out in the community about how we could do our job better.

Mr Moore: Everybody always knows how politicians can do their job better.

MRS CARNELL: It appears that those opposite, and Mr Moore as well, do not believe that they could possibly do their job better. I believe that we could all do our job better, and I think that is our role and our responsibility to the Canberra community.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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