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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (23 September) . . Page.. 3116 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

There was an extra amount of public consultation that cost $8,500 to undertake. It involved, I think, writing or delivering letters to every shopkeeper in every shopping centre in the ACT.

The result of that extra consultation was an additional seven written submissions received by the committee. I take it that some of them were from people who had already previously put in submissions anyway. That is a cost of over a thousand dollars per submission obtained by the ACT community. I am not begrudging them that; I am not attacking the committee for having asked for that. It was a reasonable request, perhaps, in the circumstances. Perhaps we were all disappointed by the response.

There are lots of consultation exercises in which the Government engages and for which there are relatively few responses. One of them, I think, is referred to in this statement - the motion of Ms McRae's which is on the notice paper at the moment and which had fairly few responses when put out by a committee of this place. The point I am making to the Assembly is that it is very easy to sit on the sidelines and say, "We should be doing this differently; we should be doing that differently; and we should be doing the other differently", but it is very difficult and onerous to actually construct the ideal consultation exercise.

Because Ms Tucker has raised this issue, I think it is worth while pointing out how difficult it is by illustrating an experience which relates to her party. This relates to something that happened last year. Last year in this place, after having sat through a week of criticism by members of the Assembly, particularly the Greens, about the consultation processes the Government engaged in, I went to my desk upstairs, feeling fairly weary and set upon. I had a meeting shortly after that with some people from the Australian Cycling Federation. They wanted to conduct a mountain bike race on Black Mountain. As soon as they left, I thought to myself, "Here is a perfect opportunity to find out how consultation should be conducted". I took all the papers that I had been given and went downstairs to the first floor to see Ms Horodny. I said to her, "Lucy, here is a proposal that has come in to the ACT Government. You have seen it only minutes after the ACT Government has first seen it. I want you to show me how we can consult about this properly. We have had lots of criticism about how we do things the wrong way every time. Tell me, from your point of view, how we should do this so as to effect a genuine process of public consultation. You tell me". She said, "Fine; leave it with me". I left the papers with her and went upstairs; and I waited.

I waited for one week, then two weeks and then three weeks. I reminded her that she was going to raise this issue with me, and she said, "Yes; I am getting around to that. Leave it with me". Four weeks went past. Five weeks later the story leaked into the media, as stories inevitably do after a period of time in this place; there are no such things as secrets. The story went to the media. Conservation groups got very upset about the fact that there was a proposal to race mountain bikes on Black Mountain. The Government had to go into damage control mode. The proposal had been in the Government's hands for over a month. Why had there been no consultation about it?

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