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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 801 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The ACT's financial position is clearly far less generously endowed than we were all led to believe would be the case and than we all assumed just a few years ago when self-government was granted and since. The article by Mr Nicholson to which Mrs Littlewood referred demonstrates very clearly that the ACT has a very considerable problem in being able to wind back areas of neglect by the Commonwealth Government and to restate and to establish a level of services and funding for those services which is commensurate with that applicable in other parts of Australia. The needs of this jurisdiction are very different; they require, in some cases, greater levels of funding, and in almost every case the basis of those greater needs can be sheeted back to the fact that we are the seat of Federal government.

For example, we have a higher cost in replacing our electricity system in the ACT because we have a system of backyard reticulation rather than front yard reticulation, as most other communities in Australia have. That is a very heavy cost to the ACT. It is a cost deliberately imposed on us by the Federal government. The fact that we have been granted self-government ought to carry with it certain rights and responsibilities by us to deal with those things. Our responsibility is to face up to what those costs are, to manage them as best we can, to deal with them, to find ways of meeting those costs; but our rights or our privileges are that we can look to the Commonwealth for some assistance in being able to address those greater costs because of those greater needs, which in turn flow from the Commonwealth's control previously of the ACT.

I want the ACT to be able to face the future with some greater certainty than it has now. We need to confront, as a parliament and as a community, the unfortunate attitude of our Federal colleagues of all parties. I hope members will join in this debate and express that view very clearly. I know that some members will be tempted to forget about the point being made by this matter of public importance and just put the boot into the Federal Liberal Government; but if they do so they miss a very important point, and that is demonstrated by those figures in Mr Nicholson's article. These problems predate the present Government. They are far more widespread than the present Government, and they are longstanding problems which we need to confront, not so much as a policy of a particular government or a particular parliament but as a mind-set about Canberra as a whole, a mind-set within the Australian nation. We have to change that, and I hope this debate will make some small contribution to doing that.

MR MOORE (4.16): It seems to me that there comes a time when parliaments must decide what they are going to do about this sort of situation. We have a situation where one parliament's prerogative overrides that of another parliament. Interestingly enough, with reference to the Federal Government, it is only 10 years or so since exactly the same thing applied to them. The British Parliament retained the power to change the Australian Constitution until the Australia Act, and that was passed by both the British Parliament and the Australian Parliament in the mid-1980s. Australia negotiated with the British Parliament in order to resolve this very problem. They sorted out the problem for themselves, and then 10 years later they turn around in a most hypocritical fashion and exercise the very power they had negotiated to ensure would not be exercised on them.

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