Page 1579 - Week 04 - Thursday, 25 March 2010
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what they wanted for themselves and at the last election they voted for a minority government. So there are three parties in this Assembly, and to an extent we are all jointly responsible for the government of the ACT.
As we know, no legislation can be passed without the agreement of two parties, or three parties of course; many times things are passed with the agreement of all three parties. The budget also has to be passed with the agreement of at least two parties. So, in terms of talking about an open, honest and accountable government, we need to look at these issues in relation to the actions of all of the members of the Assembly, not simply the members who form part of the executive government, because in the wider sense we are all part of government. I do, of course, want to still respect the Latimer House principles, and I am not trying to suggest that there is not a separation between the executive and the legislature, but they are related.
In terms of question time, which we have talked about a bit, and the processes I was talking about above in terms of scrutiny, I do not think question time is the be-all and end-all. Earlier today we had the situation where the Speaker had to warn four members during question time, and that included the Chief Minister. The question time did become more useful in the second half, when the warning had a great effect and a considerably greater amount of quiet. But question time is not the only mechanism.
Over the past 15 years the Greens have been using these processes to question and to lobby the governments of the day on their practices, policies and programs. And we have seen governments change their policies and practices as a result of our pushing, and this is true for the current Labor government and the previous Labor governments and I believe it was true for the Liberal government before that.
The committee process is one area which I think contributes well to scrutiny in this place, and the combination of chamber work with committee follow-up can be especially helpful. I am sure the Liberal Party would agree with this, particularly given the detailed work that they did on the Cotter Dam cost blow-out through these channels.
We of course believe that the government of the day needs to be accountable to the public, and one way in which we do this, and I am sure all the other members do this, is through our day-to-day interaction with constituents and members of the public and organisations. We spend a lot of time being sort of advocates and middlemen between the rest of the ACT community and executive government, prodding and pushing and getting information for them, changing government policies and keeping the government accountable on behalf of the community as a whole.
Another way in which we work to keep the government accountable, particularly to the future generations of Canberra, is to lobby and work with the government to improve existing processes, to insert longer term and more holistic thinking into them. Members may remember back to this morning when I was speaking on the PAC report on annual reports. I spoke a lot about ESD reporting and the need for that. That is part of how we keep the government accountable, particularly for the future generations who are the ones who will be most affected by our success or otherwise in ESD.
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