Page 5 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 5 November 2008
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election. And I welcome the emergence—in force—of the Greens to a substantial and powerful crossbench that they have made entirely their own. I congratulate Ms Hunter and her colleagues. I look forward to working productively with each one of you over the coming term as together we take this best of all cities and this best of all communities and make them even better.
Labor’s agenda and vision were taken to the people a little over two weeks ago. Central to that agenda is the preparation of our public health system to meet the onrush of demand as the baby boomers age—a billion dollar rebuild of the system and the experience and the capacity to deliver it.
Also in Labor’s sights is the creation of a solar capital here in Canberra. Over the past term we began the transformation with a feed-in tariff as generous as any in the world. Shortly, we will call for expressions of interest in a solar-powered plant capable of powering many thousands of homes. We have committed to a bulk purchase of photovoltaic panels that will put micro-generation within the reach of most households. Our aim is to put micro-generation plants on the roof of every public school in the city. We are about to legislate for solar rights and mandate passive solar orientation of dwellings in new developments. We can and will be a model for cities around the world when it comes to our solar credentials, as we already are in so many areas of life.
For a modest city state, we have matured enormously over our first two decades of self-government. But we still have things to learn—about governance, about service and about genuine responsibility. Much has been said and written, particularly over the past two years, about this Assembly’s one and only experience of majority government. It would be astonishing if there were not lessons to be learnt from the experience.
And in some senses, the lessons and messages Labor takes from the recent election are really lessons and messages for us collectively, as a parliament. In a single- chamber system such as ours there will always be scepticism regarding accountability and transparency. Without an upper house there will always be apprehensions that executive power is not sufficiently checked—even that it is uncheckable.
Let us not forget that such apprehensions have been aired, such scepticism has been voiced, during every term of government for the past two decades—including under conditions of minority government. To be sure, the accusations have been easier to make during a period of majority government, because the capacity of the crossbench to impose its own conditions and prosecute its own agenda—for good or for ill—was diminished.
I will not attempt to canvass here today whether the prosecution of those crossbench agendas over the course of the history of self-government has actually amounted to a genuine balancing of executive power—or simply the superimposition of a minority will on the exercise of executive power. That’s one for the scholars and for partisan history.
But the concerns and anxieties that have manifested themselves in recent times are peculiar to a unicameral system rather than to majority government per se. They have
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