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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 227 ..

MR HARGREAVES: The Chief Minister has extended it by a week. I have no intention of grovelling in gratitude to the Chief Minister for extending something by a week. A week in politics is a long time, Mr Humphries.

Mr Humphries: There you go.

MR HARGREAVES: That extra week is generosity rejected by me. The part of the process which causes me discomfort is that this government has been trying to turn the committee system into an arm of executive government. It is treating the committee system in the same way as it treats its departmental structure.

The motion refers to "recommendations that maintain or improve the operating result". We know that that is code for "Do not go above the limit of funds which has been advised". What do you think the writing instructions for the bureaucracy are? They are just that.

The standing committees of this Assembly are instruments of this Assembly and instruments of the people, not instruments of the executive. They provide advice to the Assembly, not to the government. Mr Moore-who has been here as long as Mr Humphries, Mr Wood and Mr Berry-has always considered himself a champion of the process of this place. There have been times when I have disagreed with him and thought that he has talked a whole lot of rot, but there have been other times when I have taken on board what he has said because it has made an awful lot of sense. He has been the protector of process quite often in this place. Therefore, I am surprised to see him endorsing the concept that standing committees be turned into arms of the executive.

This motion by Mr Humphries is a nice piece of blackmail. It says, "You can give us some recommendations which do not change the bottom line. You can shuffle the deck chairs around a bit." Yet we know full well that the last time we tried to do this there was an enormous jump in revenue available between the draft budget and the budget. No amount of talking will convince me that the government did not know about that along the way.

Mr Humphries: He said he did not know.

MR HARGREAVES: The Chief Minister said he did not know. That would be the first admission of inability on the part of the Chief Minister. Making committees part of the executive arm has to be knocked on the head.

I come back to the two options. We can shuffle the deck chairs a bit, or we can see what the community feels are the priorities within the set of priorities already determined by the government. We can consider what the community decides they want cut out in favour of something else. In other words, we can be either the starter of a fight between two community groups or the umpire in a fight between two community groups. Either way, the committees get thumped around.

Accountability to the community lies with the government, with the executive-not with you, Mr Speaker, not with us, not with the crossbench, not with the Assembly, but with the executive. That is why the executive are paid twice the salary that Mrs Burke gets.

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