Page 231 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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advice to be given to ministers in confidence, in a frank and fearless manner, so that ministers can make decisions with the best possible advice and uphold their responsibilities as members of a cabinet government.
So these two competing pressures are significant ones. The parliaments and the executives need to resolve and find a balance in how these two competing pressures are accommodated. That will provide the Assembly, the legislature, with the ability to access documents in a timely way and to see as much information as is reasonable, without constraining the ability of collective cabinet decision making and responsibility to work effectively. These are the two tensions that we are debating this afternoon.
I think the approach adopted by the Greens is one that deserves to be commended because we will, I am sure, see disagreements in the future between this government, the opposition and the crossbenchers on which documents should be released to the legislature. But what we have agreed, as a governing party and as a crossbench party, is that we will establish a mechanism to resolve these disputes through an independent arbiter going forward. That mechanism is the one that should be seen as the real win for the Assembly and for governance in the territory overall.
It is not about some cheap political point scoring like we have seen from the Leader of the Opposition today about securing a particular document. Whatever the outcome is on that particular debate, without a mechanism to resolve these disputes and see us moving forward, we will see the same grandstanding, we will see the same cheap political point scoring on each and every occasion. But it will not move the whole matter forward as to how we resolve this tension between the legislature and the executive.
That is why the Labor Party has agreed, in its agreement with the Greens, that the way to resolve these disputes about which executive documents should be made available to the Assembly, and how calls for documents should be resolved, is to establish the independent arbiter approach. I am disappointed that the Liberal Party seems to be unaware of these developments, particularly given the fact that it is spelt out publicly in an agreement between the Labor Party and the Greens and it would not take much work to go and look at the standing orders of the New South Wales upper house to understand how it works.
As I have indicated as manager of government business in meetings with all parties prior to this sitting, it is the government’s intention to move forward with an amendment to the standing orders to put in place that disputes mechanism, that call for documents mechanism, and to do so in the February sitting. It was my desire to have it in place and put forward as part of the package of amendments to the standing orders that were debated and passed by the Assembly yesterday. That unfortunately was not possible due to some issues of finetuning that needed to be resolved on this mechanism. But it is the government’s ongoing commitment that that mechanism will be in place, will be debated and passed by this place in the February sitting. And we stand by that.
I think it is probably worth outlining to members how that mechanism would work. In general, the mechanism in the New South Wales upper house provides for a member
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