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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2551 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

On the first day of the ACT Assembly in 1989 the two parties worked together against the opposition of the other members of the Assembly to amend the standing orders to provide for a Leader of the Opposition. The amendments to the standing orders that I have proposed today merely reverse those original changes.

In putting forward this motion I am not suggesting that there should not be leaders of parties in this Assembly or that they should not have formal recognition. If the ALP wants to elect Mr Berry as its leader, that is fine; but the ALP or any future non-government party has no right to say that their leader is the leader of all non-government members. The key question that I want to raise by this motion is: Does this Assembly really need a Leader of the Opposition? I would say that it does not, because all parties and Independents outside of the government perform the role of opposition.

Let me go through the role as described in House of Representatives Practice. Historically the position came about only because of the dominance of the two-party system in Australian politics, so in effect you had only one party in power and one party in opposition. In the traditional Westminster system the Opposition is regarded as the alternative government and its leader the alternative Prime Minister or Premier. However, this situation does not apply in the ACT. At present we have a minority Liberal Government, and if the Government should fall the ALP would still need the support of other members of the Assembly to form a government. The leader of the ALP is also not guaranteed to be the future Chief Minister, as the Chief Minister is elected by the Assembly as a whole, not just by the ALP members.

A number of other functions for the Opposition are listed in House of Representatives Practice. They are: Scrutiny of, criticism of, and suggestion of improvements to legislation and financial proposals; examination of expenditure and public accounts; seeking information on and clarification of government policy, principally questions with and without notice; surveillance, appraisal and criticism of government administration; ventilating legitimate grievances; petitioning; and examination of delegated legislation. When you look at this list it is clear that all non-Government members undertake the role of the Opposition, and I would say that the Greens and Independents often do it better than the official Opposition.

The amendment to the standing orders that we have proposed today may look very simple, but it has big implications for the way this Assembly operates. This move is, however, just a reflection of what is happening across Australian politics generally. In an article in the Australian dated 23 August 1997, Frank Moorhouse made a number of telling observations on the two-party system. He described the adversarial nature of Government and Opposition, as well as the labelling of Left and Right, as "perhaps the most serious obstacles to Australian political advancement". He said:

For contemporary Australian politics it is a useless categorisation. The critical thing is that we have moved away from having two major political parties representing radically different views of the way society should be organised ... The Parties are now management teams, and the

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