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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2591 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

Similarly, the incidents the Estimates Committee encountered in, I think, 1995 were disruptive. I do not recall the year; I think it was one of the first Estimates Committee hearings that I chaired. There was a lot of public sector agitation at the time and we had quite noisy and intrusive demonstrations. My questions to the Speaker really had quite a level of sympathy for the type of situation that we can encounter when we do choose to share our proceedings so readily with members of the general public. I think the report that has come out has been sympathetic to those concerns and has quite sensitively dealt with the issues before us.

What I would like to do today, and I hope that it is picked up next year - next year will be the tenth year that this Assembly has been in existence - is propose that now we start thinking about beginning a project next year in which we could begin to write our own set of practices. I know we are inextricably linked to the Westminster system and I know I have said many a time that I think that is very important and that parliaments will always rely on House of Representatives Practice and the further sets of practices from, essentially, the House of Commons. Our link through the standing orders to the House of Commons is a very direct one. If one looks at the standing orders, they come directly from our oldest parliament.

But our practices are very different, our experience is very different; and we are one of the few parliaments throughout the world that are going to be, I believe, consistently minority government parliaments. As such, a lot of the things that happen are very different; a lot of the customs and practices that we have evolved already over the last nine years are profoundly different from the way other parliaments work. Of course, this is an example of how we have had to resolve our own issues - by referring back to other practices, looking at what other parliaments do, but coming up with our own solutions for our own building, our own Government, our own Assembly and our own workings.

I think this is the beginning of what should be a more thorough job. It will eventually be done, I suppose, in conjunction with the legislation on the precincts. We need to put that together. Perhaps we ought to start to consider getting the Secretariat busy on a special project and see whether we can start to develop our own set of customs and practices, beliefs, understandings and expectations from our own Assembly, so that we do not revert every time to something which is useful in terms of historical precedent and in terms of interpretation of the Westminster system but is not exactly always practical in an Assembly of 17 which deals with the public that is just there, which has very open committee work, which has a very open building, which has Assembly offices that are electorate offices, which has Assembly offices that are Executive offices as well.

This Assembly deals with all of that in a way that very few other parliaments in the Commonwealth or anywhere in the world do. I hope this is a springboard, and if I am lucky enough to be elected next year I will come back to the issue and perhaps start some sort of activity, perhaps through the Administration and Procedure Committee or through a special project, by which we start to draw on our own experiences and start to define our own interpretation of what an Assembly and a parliament means for the people of the ACT.

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