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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001-2002 Week 1 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 35 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Standing here today, and with this story in mind, I am conscious of my responsibility to the people of Ginninderra who elected me, to the people of the ACT and to the wider Australian community of which we are all inextricably a part.

I come here well aware that elected politicians are seldom held in the highest of esteem. Too often, they are seen as either beholden to a narrow interest or sectoral group or so amorphous as to exhibit no belief in anything greater than mere political survival.

I am indebted to that great contemporary figure, Vaclav Havel, the dissident writer who courageously defied the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, led the "Velvet Revolution", and who went on to become the Czech president. Havel, writing about his native land, whose rich cultural traditions and heritage had been so diminished by the generation of brutalisation, reminds us that in politics, as in life, there is more at stake than the exigencies of the moment.

Alone among the leaders of post-communist Europe, he articulated the message that reconstruction was not simply a matter of rebuilding an economy: it was of re-establishing a climate of trust, of civic virtue and of public morality. Political life, he has taught me, has a moral dimension, a higher responsibility. Without that it amounts to nothing.

Havel, as a great exemplar of morality in public life, has written that this recognition of a higher responsibility grows out of our certainty that death ends nothing, because everything is forever being recorded and evaluated somewhere else. He has spelled out a credo that I am happy to adopt as my own. He writes:

If we are to redeem public life in the eyes of those we purport to serve, we must recognise this duty of service, not only in what we do but in the way we do it. It is my fond hope that this Fifth Assembly of the ACT will in its deliberations and actions enhance, not diminish, the civic life of our community.

Mr Speaker, most people know that I am the mother of five splendid children who are the centrepiece of my life. I come into this place with an abiding belief in the primacy of the family in our society, and the pressing need to elevate the idea of family, to make it a prism through which policy can be viewed and evaluated.

It is a matter of some concern to me that in some quarters of public life the family has become just another interest group to be listened to or not listened to; to have its arguments and values weighed against contending arguments and values in the debate on social policy. As long as I am here, I will work to ensure that the family is at the centre and not the periphery of the political process.

Although a newcomer to this Assembly, I have been involved in politics in the ACT for some years, and I am privileged to have played a role in a couple of milestones in the ACT. I am particularly proud of my involvement in the Hare-Clark campaign committee, which oversaw the electoral referendum. In 1992, Canberrans decisively rejected the idea

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