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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 4033 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

improve the lot of the people in Canberra and they had a vision for that. But each of us has a different responsibility. It is the responsibility of the Opposition to maintain pressure at whatever cost and to withstand this nonsense of someone saying, "You have no vision. You have no ideas. You are just negative". It is just nonsense.

Ultimately, it is up to us how we work the ground rules. When I had to move into the fast lane when I became Speaker, what I found most interesting in looking at the history of standing orders and the history of the Westminster system was how cleverly the Westminster system was put together to cope with conflict. I refer back to my earlier comment on the televising of parliament. Our standing orders are a historical consequence of those in the House of Commons. I could go to the House of Commons now and I would know most of the standing orders that Betty Boothroyd operates under. They are the same as ours.

From the very beginning, most of the standing orders had within them a requirement that members of parliament be of good and steady character. Parliamentarians were not supposed to lose their tempers, to raise their voices or to be very unpleasant with each other. The management of conflict assured that. That is why we address the Speaker. That is why we do not refer to each other by personal names. That is why so many of the standing orders reflect a high level of courtesy and formality, which has of course eroded a little over the last 600 years or whatever it is. In my mind, that erosion is partly due to the contemporary pressures of the press and television and our changing public role. From the very beginning the intent was that we operate in a courteous and formal manner. I would like to put on record that it is up to us to reorganise and to do that again. Maybe the notion that we are uncivil and negative has been exacerbated by the way we have allowed ourselves to behave within our parliaments. It is up to us, not the Speaker, to determine the standard of behaviour in parliaments. It is done by a process of agreement. We should all go back to basics and look at the origins of our democratic system.

For my final point, let me turn to something that Mrs Littlewood seems to give very little credence to. Every single Labor member is on a committee. Some us chair committees; some of us are just members. There is absolutely no way that any member of a committee does not participate fully in whatever is in front of that committee. I would say that every Labor member comes fully briefed, fully on top of the issues and fully prepared to keep an open mind on whatever is in front of that committee. The Opposition has never said, "We will not participate in this committee. We are preserving our right to be the Opposition and we will never work toward a good outcome". In every instance the Opposition has taken its committee responsibilities seriously and facilitated outcomes which, in most cases, have been extremely positive for government. They have been negotiated outcomes.

Where is the acknowledgment of that? There has been none whatsoever. It is not a sexy issue for the press, but I think it is amazing that a member of our Assembly is completely unaware of that and unwilling to acknowledge it. That has been the most constructive and positive and proper role that the Opposition has played, but that in no way detracts from the fact that the responsibility of the Opposition is to criticise, to create conflict where necessary, to create the issues and to maintain the pressure, no matter how unpleasant Mrs Littlewood or anybody else finds it.

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