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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 921 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

particular point, that particular point and so on throughout the report, but Mr Hird never offered a single word of opposition to any of the matters which were contained in the report; in fact, he is on the record as refusing to do so. How on earth can a committee consider the contribution of a member to a report and try to reach consensus in relation to a range of matters if it is being treated with such contempt?

Mr Hird advises us in his dissenting report:

Mr Hird, are you trying to suggest to us that the Minister was not listening to what was going on, did not know what the public submissions were about, although they were all made public by the committee, and did not have a chance to respond? Do you think that the Minister would avoid the opportunity to make a written submission to the committee about a particular matter if he was upset about it? I think not. I think that you are treating the committee process with contempt if you are suggesting that the Minister would sit idly by and not take note of a committee inquiry and, in fact, would not devote at least one member of his staff to a watching brief of the committee's deliberations. Stop kidding us, Harold. That is a joke.

Mr Hird went on to say:

Did that happen with your own committee? No, it did not. It did not happen with the committee you chaired, yet you criticised the committee to which you refused to make a contribution for not allowing it and, dare I say, never asked it to do so - not from my memory of the deliberations, anyway.

This dissenting report is a poor reflection on the Government's ability to deal with the committee system. I have no doubt that Mr Hird is having some pressure put on him from various quarters to be critical of committee processes which are critical of the Government. But to completely deny us the opportunity to discuss any of the matters that he had a problem with and then go through this appalling pretence that in some way there had been deliberation of these matters is just a joke. The fact of the matter is that it has been exposed now that there was no debate about them. Mr Hird refused to contribute to the debate and never criticised any of the recommendations which were put forward. We were never able to consider his views.

Ms Tucker has dealt with most of the issues and the report speaks for itself, but I will deal with a couple more issues which I think are worth talking about. The first is teachers' salaries. Many times we have debated in this place the need for final detailed negotiations between industrial organisations and various arms of government and the argument always has been put that we should leave it to the negotiators on the various sides to sort out the final detail. Mr Hird seems to be suggesting that we ought to have

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