Page 5758 - Week 15 - Thursday, 10 December 2009
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I do look forward to a small break myself, and I certainly urge it on every single member of this place. We do an important job; it is a hard and at times extremely stressful job. We are, I believe, hard on ourselves in terms of the burden and the stress that we suffer in the jobs that we pursue in this place. That goes for each and every one of us. It is a hard and demanding job for each of us individually. It is tough on our families, and I think it is enormously important that each of us takes the opportunity for a break and that we do take the opportunity to spend this time with our families to recharge our own batteries and to protect and nurture our families and ourselves. In that context, I wish each and every one of you, my fellow MLAs, all the best for Christmas and the holiday season.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (6.24): I would like to join all the previous speakers in their kind words about and their thanks to the Secretariat. Without the Secretariat and all the staff, we simply would not exist. We could not do anything, and any success is due to them in a very large part.
I would also like to thank my fellow MLAs for their contributions from all three sides of this chamber. It is a challenging work environment to be in. I have never been in a place where we had three teams before, but we do sometimes manage to work as one and pass some good legislation for the people of Canberra.
I would like to thank my staff, in particular, Indra, Matt and Narelle. I would like to thank particularly my fellow Greens’ staff and obviously my fellow Green MLAs. I would like to thank my constituents, and I have been lucky enough to have emails and phone calls from many of them, and the various industry groups and community groups that I have had contact with over the year. They have always had very useful and informative comments to make.
A lot of this year has been fascinating, and some of it has been less than fascinating. One of the things I find sitting in the chair as Assistant Speaker is that I notice that just occasionally—I would say very occasionally—people are not paying full attention to the member speaking. So I have thought what we could do about this. The suggestion is Legislative Assembly bingo. Now, I am indebted to Mr Coe for this original idea in his speech on Redex, where Mr Coe asked, “How many minutes difference are there between bus times and bus timetables?” Then he proceeded to call out about 50 different numbers, just like a bingo caller, so I thought—
Mr Coe: You should have shouted out!
MS LE COUTEUR: I should have, and I missed it, so I am making up for it now, Alastair. I have also been inspired by the attendants, because they have told me that they also, in fact, play bingo. In the morning they play bingo on which of is going to be first in the chamber. So I am suggesting that maybe we could go for a new standing order for Legislative Assembly bingo, and I have thought of some of the rules, but probably will not have time to go through it all in the time remaining to me. I think, though, it would be a fairly easy game. We will have points for various levels of difficulty, and some of the easy ones might be for the first time you hear “opposition for opposition’s sake” or “you’re just not interested in it”.
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