Page 320 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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Turning to accountability mechanisms within Latimer—accountability of the executive to parliament—the guidelines state:
Parliamentary procedures should provide adequate mechanisms to enforce the accountability of the executive to parliament. These should include:
(i) a committee structure appropriate to the size of Parliament, adequately resourced and with the power to summon witnesses, including ministers.
We have gone some of the way towards that here in the ACT. We have a reasonable committee structure. I would question whether we have properly resourced it over the years, particularly in the last few years. I know that is part of the Labor-Greens agreement, but we want to see that implemented in a genuine way, so that committees are actually resourced to do the job with which they are tasked. We saw too often in the last Assembly committees not being able to complete nearly enough work, simply because of the lack of resources.
Also, that power to summon witnesses, including ministers, is very important, and I would want to see that strengthened. I think it is a little bit unclear. There has been a bit of a tussle between the executive and committees in relation to the delivery of papers and the summoning of witnesses. So we might need to look at how that is strengthened in order for this to work.
There are a number of other parts to the accountability mechanisms which I will not go through in detail. Looking at law making, there is a requirement that laws should be scrutinised and debated and, particularly important, there should be consultation. We have seen just this week that principle already being tossed out, despite the changes to the standing orders.
As I flagged earlier, whilst these principles are very good in terms of governance, and I believe that many of them are very strongly implemented here in the ACT and in Australia generally, there is some scope to strengthen that. We do have concerns about how some of these may be implemented in practice, and that is why, when Ms Hunter moves her motion regarding committee consideration of the implementation of the principles, we will be very keen to look at some of the detail.
Some of the statements within Latimer do cause me some concern, and do cause the Canberra Liberals some concern. The encouragement of a very expansive reading of bills of rights by the judiciary is one cause of concern for us. We would not want to see a situation where judges are making laws as a result of that. That has been our concern for some time. I acknowledged when we last spoke about this issue that we have not yet seen evidence of it in the ACT, but in the implementation of these principles we would reserve the right to not support implementation which encouraged excessive judicial activism, and that is one of the issues there.
The principles talk about representation. We have talked about representation of women in parliament, and representation that balances the regional and ethnic make-up of a community. Obviously, the only way to enforce that properly would be through some sort of affirmative action. We would have concerns about the level of affirmative action.
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