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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2739 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Administration and Procedure Committee there is always competition to get certain items of private members business up. The committee, in my experience over quite a number of years, has always acted in a very reasonable and rational way by consensus. Nevertheless, I think that you are being pretty sensitive, in fact supersensitive.

This motion simply seeks to allow private members to get through a bit more of their business. Government business, under this standing order, would account for about two-thirds of the week's work in a sitting week, and private members business for about a third. That includes, of course, Government backbenchers. It is an unusual circumstance; but Executive members also can put up private members business, as happened, for example, with Marshall Perron in the Northern Territory on euthanasia. So there are other opportunities for private members business as well. This is to be done on a trial basis so that we can see how it works through to the end of this year. That makes it a very sensible motion and one that I will be delighted to support.

I will say one other thing. We inherited these standing orders from the House of Representatives. It was perfectly reasonable for us to take the House of Representatives standing orders and then slowly develop them to suit ourselves. We have taken them from a chamber where there has almost always been majority government and where members of the Executive have the power to look after themselves. We are going to adapt them, recognising the differences in this chamber and how we are likely to work. I think we will see constant modifications to the standing orders. I hope we will continue to do it a small bit at a time, so that we can still grow in the way we operate and the way we work, and grow in a positive way. When we find that something that appears to be a good idea does not work, we will be able to pull back from it. That is the advantage of the way this motion is worded. I think it is a very positive initiative on the part of Ms Tucker and it gives me pleasure to support it.

MR BERRY (5.13): Is it not amazing that some issues raised in this house are political and some are positive and constructive? It seems to me that this place is about serving the political needs of the community, and there really is not much out there that is not political. It nags me a little bit to hear "politics" becoming a dirty word. My Green colleagues are as capable as the rest of us of delivering a particular press release or a speech which might, to use their standards, be described as political.

Mr Moore: The most political of them is when they are saying, "We are not being political".

MR BERRY: Indeed. That is just a little nagging point that I wanted to raise in the course of this debate. So far as the Government is concerned, Mr Humphries is right to express some concerns about the ability of the Executive to deliver its timetable. Nobody will stand in their way, methinks. In fact, the Labor Party would encourage you to go back to Tuesday night sittings if you really want to go back part of the way to delivering your promise on council-style government. We would not stand in the way of reinstating the Tuesday night sittings on top of this.

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