Page 2427 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
That would be for members in Brindabella and Ginninderra, who obviously have fewer households to service than those in Molonglo. Molonglo members might need $11,000 or $12,000. They are modest sums, but that would enable members perhaps twice a year and certainly once a year to do a mail-out to all their constituents, just to keep them informed of what is occurring. Whilst quite a large number of constituents probably are not going to be terribly interested in that, it is a traditional, tried and proven way of ensuring that at least members have the ability to advise their constituents on a number of issues, tell them what they are doing and point out issues of relevance to certain areas of their electorates. It is an essential way for members to communicate with all their constituents.
I hear what Dr Foskey says about committee rooms. One is only going to deal with a limited number of people there. If there was a choice I would go for the mail-out any time, but there is no reason why one cannot do both. What she is proposing seems quite moderate and modest. At this stage in the Assembly’s existence, most members in this place see a real need for members to be able to adequately communicate with their constituents. What I am suggesting involves modest amounts of money. I do not think we would ever want to go down the path of the federal parliament or perhaps some other state assemblies and parliaments. For those modest amounts one of the biggest problems we have in adequately representing our constituents could be overcome.
Of course, we have the benefit of seeing our constituents when we go shopping on a Saturday morning. We see our constituents if we are involved outside of this place in various community organisations. We have a much greater ability to do that than larger parliaments. But that does not negate the fact that we need to be able to communicate with all of our constituents, and the tried and proven way of doing that is through a mail-out. That certainly needs to be addressed, if not in the financial year we have just started, at least in future.
MRS BURKE (Molonglo) (11.35): I respond to this part of the 2006-07 Appropriation Bill to highlight my concerns particularly about our committee system in the Assembly. It is an area of the Secretariat which we would all have to agree continues to do a sterling job. The staff who work within this busy section of the administrative wing of the Assembly are very responsive indeed despite a shortfall in adequate resourcing. The Secretariat continues to work under, I believe, quite demanding circumstances yet always seems to provide the most sound advice and service to committees and individual members of this Assembly with very limited resources to hand. Although on paper it would appear that the Secretariat is sufficiently resourced, I truly suspect that it manages to conduct its work on a lean budget and does so in a creative manner in order to deliver a service that may well be delivered with much larger budgets and possibly better resources in other jurisdictions.
I commend the work of the staff working in our Secretariat, but I point out that there is a need to reconsider the resources offered to this valuable service provider in the ACT Legislative Assembly. The efforts undertaken to service our committee system and parliamentary and associated services should not go unrecognised and it is important that this be highlighted in a public manner. I am obviously referring to recommendation 30 in which the estimates committee recommended an increase to the committee secretariat to increase its ability to provide support to the ACT Legislative Assembly’s committees. It
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .