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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3443 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

Some of you are going to ask how you can have a government if you have only 15 members and the governing party has maybe only six of them and has to form a cabinet of five or four and have to man all the committees. The answer to that is very simple: do away with the government and opposition concept and adopt a concept of 15 members all working together to achieve good government for this territory. Forget party divisions; forget governments and oppositions. You can still have ministers if you want them, but they do not have to be-

MR SPEAKER: Order! The house will come to order. Mr Moore will stop embracing Mr Kaine.

MR KAINE: I am quite prepared to work with the current minister for health, and I emphasise "current", because under my proposal there would not be a government and an opposition in the traditional sense. I would envisage the system working in this way: we would have five standing committees, which we pretty much do now. After an election, the Assembly would meet and, after electing the Speaker, it would then elect the members of the five standing committees. Those standing committees would go away and consider who they wanted to be their chair.

You might have two committees with Labor leaders, you might have two with Liberal leaders and you might have one with a member of the crossbench as the leader, but those five people would constitute the executive. You would then have a situation where you do not have a Liberal government and a Labor opposition or vice versa. You would have 15 members of the Assembly, all of whom are contributing equally to the decision-making processes, and any five of the 15 can become the executive.

Why, then, do we need 21 members? If you did that, you would have a Speaker and five members of the executive; that is six. You would still have nine people to man all the committees and do all the work for which, at the moment, one poor backbencher has to carry the burden on the part of the government.

It seems to me that, instead of having six or seven members in government, four or five sitting in opposition and the rest sitting on the crossbench and having virtually no involvement in the executive decision-making, it would be a far better proposition to have the full use of all the facilities, capabilities, experience and background of all the members of the Assembly in the executive process. Why exclude at least two-thirds of them from the executive process?

I have never had anybody explain to me why we have to have the set-up that we have now. When the federal parliament set up the territorial government in 1989, I do not believe that they envisaged necessarily that we would have this Westminster system with a government and an opposition, all the trappings of office of ministers and all of those things. Despite the best endeavours of leaving it to us to sort it out, what did they get? They got a miniature Westminster system. The result is that three-quarters of us sit around here and the government sits over there.

When we are debating this question of how many members there should be in this place, why do we always begin with the presumption that there is a need for more members? Frankly, Mr Speaker, I am not convinced that that is necessary. If we were to work in

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