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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (23 October) . . Page.. 3982 ..

MR HARGREAVES

makeup of the Assembly after each election, which I am pretty sure is due to the fact that the electorate do not get to know their member.

Although there are many upsides, one of the downsides of the Hare-Clark system is that we share an electorate. For example, I share an electorate of 100,000 people with four other members. I suppose, therefore, I am entitled to 20,000 constituents-but I do not have a clue which 20,000 they are, so I have to provide a service to all of those people. I found it difficult in my first term to get to know every part of my electorate-to know how it ticks and what are the areas of concern. An extra year would help that. Four years is also plenty of time for voters to make a decision on whether their member is a good member or a bad member.

Another aspect of backbenchers' work in this Assembly that is particularly relevant is committee work. Very valuable reports come out of committee inquiries but their recommendations are never implemented. We have seen this happen on many occasions; Ms Tucker has suffered from this with committees that she has chaired. The report on children at risk is one that springs instantly to mind. The reason the recommendations from that report were not enacted or proceeded with related to the time that the government of the day had to be held accountable for not picking up on those recommendations. An election intervened and it fell over, which meant that a lot of the issues that Ms Tucker was dealing with, which were very valid, had to be picked up again recently by the inquiry that I chaired.

What happens is that, if you are unfortunate enough to kick off your inquiry in year two of a three-year term-the same thing could happen in year three of a four-year term, I acknowledge-by the time you have concluded your significant inquiry the government of the day has no time to implement the changes that have been recommended. It has not got a hope of doing so before the election. So there is not the time to hold any government of the day accountable for what it has said it would do in response to a committee's report. We have to remember that in a lot of cases those recommendations involve budget funding, so the government's implementation strategy is linked to the budget cycle. That is the significant issue and that is why recommendations fall over. It is not that the government of the day does not want to pick up the recommendations and run with them; it is because it kicks into a budget cycle, and if that budget cycle happens to be after an election or close to the next one there is no time to examine the implementation phase because the money does not flow to the agency to enable them to get on and do it in the first place. A four-year term will make that a bit better.

We should also consider that the committee system here is, in addition to being a conduit for the community to talk to its parliament, in a sense a system of review. The committee system, if participated in honestly and with integrity, can act as a mini house of review for the Assembly. It has the ability to be an accountability agent. Members need to have experience in committee work to be able to do that job properly. Three years, I have to tell you, is not enough. I do not think that I was qualified after the first three years. I certainly felt a lot more comfortable after the ensuing eight months, and when I came into my second term here I was very comfortable with the process. But I do not reckon I had my act together on what the role of committees was until at least halfway through the second year of office. I think that is a particularly valid point.

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