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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4915 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Just the other day, we passed the Administration (Interstate Agreements) Bill. These are all things that make the Assembly work better. In almost all of those cases, there has been fairly widespread agreement. There may have been disagreement on details. Even now, when we look back at them, we find that, even when there was disagreement, people said, "They have had an impact. They work".

It seems to me, Mr Speaker, that there are many things here that we have to be proud of and there are many ways in which we have attempted to improve the workings of this Assembly for the benefit of the people of the ACT. From my perspective, they include the work that was done by Chief Minister Rosemary Follett on the 2020 vision. It was an issue that she had originally been reluctant to take on; but, once the motion had been passed in this Assembly, she took it on and did it extremely well. It was a great credit to her and her Government, of which Mr Berry was a part. Then that moved on in terms of developing a strategy, and through that we looked at "Governing Canberra". It came back to the National Capital Futures Conference, where many of these things linked together.

There is no doubt that there is room for improvement in the way we operate. There will always be room for improvement in the way we operate in this Assembly. After I had attended that National Capital Futures Conference and had expressed significant disquiet about some of the things I heard, the Chief Minister announced that she would be putting this matter to a committee for it to be considered. It seemed to me, Mr Speaker, that the critical factor was ensuring that we had somebody to chair that committee who would be seen as independent. That is why I approached the Chief Minister and nominated Professor Pettit.

Mr Berry: Thanks for consulting me, Michael. You are just as bad as they are.

MR MOORE: By the way, Professor Pettit had written a joint article with me opposing one of the fundamentals that Kate Carnell had pushed - citizen-initiated referenda. He had also very recently published a book on governance, on the philosophy of democracy. To support my argument that he was the appropriate person, I provided to the Chief Minister and Mr Humphries copies of a summary that he had written in his book called Republicanism. Just a short time ago, Mr Berry interjected, "Well, thanks for consulting me". Wayne, every time I have consulted you in the last while, since you have become Leader of the Opposition and before, whatever it is that I have worked on you have wrecked. I will not consult you if you continue with that kind of approach. What I do instead is seek to work with other members of your party on whatever the issue is that they have responsibility for. When you do not work on a wrecking basis when you are consulted, I will be delighted to go back and open that process. I invite you right now to continue that process.

Mr Berry: If you ever get a good idea, it would be a good start.

MR MOORE: I will take that interjection. I realise that you think I never have a good idea. Since I never have a good idea, what is the point of consulting with you? In this case, I actually thought that I had a very good idea for the nomination of somebody who - - -

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