Page 2154 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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the fact that the commonwealth should not interfere with every legislative process here but we continue to conduct ourselves as though we are the old advisory council, trying to get everything on the cheap. That does not mean it has to be tearaway extravagance, but there ought not to be these issues that preoccupy the mindset and time of MLAs, and I hear them way too often.
What are the solutions? As I said, maybe the case has not been well-articulated. Maybe there is a mindset that feels comfortable with that sort of—and this is not my language, it was used by somebody, not an MLA, in this place—parsimonious approach to these matters, or it may be the government is being tight-fisted. I worked for the Victorian Liberal government back in the early 1980s. When that government went out of office—fortunately I had jumped ship six months earlier—my colleagues were in a state of trauma when they realised what little resources they were provided in opposition. When I caught up with a few of them, I said to them that you always want to keep that in mind when you treat your opponents in such poor circumstances; one day you might find yourself sitting in that seat.
Mr Hargreaves: We have.
MR MULCAHY: Indeed, as Mr Hargreaves said, you have been there. So whether this is by design or accident I am not entirely sure, but there are solutions. I draw, Mr Speaker, from a paper delivered by you at the 38th Presiding Officers and Clerks conference in July this year, where you outlined the Latimer House principles in developing a legislature’s budget. I have been fortunate to be able to read that paper. I believe it contains some compelling arguments for future budgetary treatment for the Assembly. In this paper, Mr Berry argues forcefully that special budgetary principles called the Latimer House principles should apply to the funding of parliaments. These principles are designed to ensure parliamentary autonomy from the executive and to ensure that the ruling party of the day, through its executive, is not able to hamstring its opponents by selective allocation of resources to the legislature. In particular Mr Berry draws attention to the inherent dangers of the budgetary process that allows the ruling party great scope to determine the resources of its opponents. As Mr Berry puts it:
… it is not too difficult to imagine the potential for budget initiatives proposed by the Assembly through this process to come into direct conflict with the political interests and policy positions of the government of the day.
Even aside from this more serious danger, there is also a danger of inefficiency that occurs when the executive attempts to micromanage the affairs of Assembly members through restrictive procedural rules for their offices. It has certainly been fairly clear to me in my time in the Assembly that different MLAs have different ways of running their offices. Some, such as me, have used principles and procedures they have learned through managerial roles in business and government. Others have borrowed procedures from other kinds of organisations and others may have developed their own methods from scratch. But the ability of members to run their offices effectively may be compromised by unwarranted interference in procedural matters.
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