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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (10 March) . . Page.. 543 ..

"Presiding

Member may adjourn the committee without the question being put, or may suspend the committee. The Committee shall reconvene at a time to be named by the Presiding Member or at a time to be fixed by the Speaker or, in the absence of the Speaker, the Deputy Speaker, on receipt of a request in writing from an absolute majority of members of the Committee.".

Mr Speaker, this motion has its origins in Estimates Committee proceedings in, I think, August of last year when, as a result of the community consultation which was established by that committee, members of the community approached the committee in relation to budget matters. Mr Speaker, the motion has its origins there, but it is a motion which would give the presiding member of a committee some authority to maintain order in respect of the deliberations of the committee - in particular, in relation to public hearings involving members of the community.

Last August we had Professor Williams and Professor Freyon before us in relation to arts funding in the ACT which, as you may recall, was a matter of some contention and which involved a long and successful picket by musicians outside this place. It also involved significant contributions to the Assembly's Estimates Committee. During these proceedings, a member became quite unruly and I found myself quite powerless to do anything about it. It was the first time that I had ever come in contact with that sort of behaviour in an Assembly committee. It certainly troubled me that I or any other presiding member might be put in the same spot where they were not able to do anything about it.

Mr Speaker, you have got adequate powers to deal with members who defy your rulings and you have exercised those powers in the past. Some of us have applauded the exercising of those powers; some of us have not been so happy about it. Nevertheless, you have those powers to exercise. The difficulty for presiding members is that they have no powers to deal with these matters. One has to be careful in drawing up a motion or another standing order to deal with this matter to ensure that the presiding member is not able to usurp the authority of the Assembly. For example, it would be, in my view, a little extreme if the presiding member was able to exclude a member from the deliberations of a committee, because the member of the committee had been appointed by this Assembly. In my view, it would be inappropriate for them to be excluded from performance on those committees.

The best that I could come up with in the form of a motion after consultation with staff from the secretariat was the motion which is before you. That merely gives the presiding member the opportunity to take the heat out of any circumstances which arise in committee proceedings. There are times when members become unruly. Indeed, even I have even been a little bit elevated in my criticism of certain matters in committee meetings. But I must repeat that it has never been in circumstances such as that.

Mr Humphries made the point of referring to the Hansard of the committee proceedings at the time and said that he did not think there was anything particularly wrong as far as he could see from the Hansard, as I recall it.

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