Page 2429 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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Mr Mulcahy: You could not afford to.
Mrs Dunne: You cannot afford to do it.
MR BERRY: Some members do within their allowances, I assure you. It is a matter of how one chooses to use one’s resources. There is a capacity to divert some support resources into contractors to do these sorts of things. It occurs. I must say, it is a modest process by any assessment but the community expects us to be modest as well. It seems to me that there will always be demand from members to better communicate. After all, we are politicians and we will want to communicate our ideas as much as we can to our members. I recall, not long after we came here, some federal parliamentary members lamenting the recognition factors that were reported in the local media for each of the members here and how even the least well known members were well recognised in the community compared to the recognition rates in their constituencies. It was because of the media concentration on this Assembly. That is an important but free way of communicating one’s ideas to the community.
There is also the fact that everybody in this place has some sort of front-line job—whether it is the chair of a committee, a shadow portfolio, speaker or a member of the executive. Everybody has some sort of pointy-end job where they are able to communicate with their electorate. That is not my defending the case that sometimes it is a struggle. It will always be a struggle to have the resources that we need to communicate all of our ideas to those electors who expect us to perform and will eventually judge our performance under the Hare-Clark electoral system. It is important for me to defend the way we do business with each other—how I as Speaker in the place responsible for some of those administrative arrangements consult with members around the place and how staff members in the Assembly Secretariat who, through the Clerk, work for me to serve the needs of members in this place.
I could stand up in this place and say, “well, the budget is adequate.” It will never be adequate for the sorts of ideas that members wish to communicate to their electorates, but it is all we have. What I do defend is the way we try to allocate those resources in a balanced way to all of the needs in the Assembly. The Clerk and all of the staff are to be congratulated for input here—from attendants right through all of the classifications the Clerk has responsibility for. I congratulate them for all of the work that they put in here. From time to time an element of judgment has to be made by me on these things on the advice of the Clerk. At the same time, an element of judgment and democratic decision-making goes into the consultation process between my office and the administration and procedure committee. I thank members for their forbearance.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (11.47): I do not want to labour this, because I know there are a lot of other, larger budget items. I know the old saying, “In a two-horse race, always back self-interest,” and there is a measure of that in these comments—from all of us. The Speaker went to some length to talk about the way the Clerk and others administer things. That is not really the issue that members are being critical of here. I know the problem that if you give 10 staff to people they say we now have so much work we need another five. That is one of the organisational issues one deals with in every sort of dimension.
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