Page 4630 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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Zed Seselja believe he is less competent than other opposition leaders around the nation—less able to be trusted when he casts his vote on legislation? Does he think his Liberal team should not be trusted?
It is simply avoiding the issue to say, as the Liberal Party has said in the past, “Let’s not get drawn into a proper debate about the disallowance powers of the commonwealth until we have had a broad-ranging review of every aspect of the self-government act.” Everyone in this Assembly would like to see such a broad-ranging review, and we will keep agitating for one. But some of us do not believe we should pass up the opportunity to achieve incremental change, incremental reform, when it presents itself.
What the Liberals have previously argued on this subject is that if they cannot have everything at once, they would prefer nothing at all. It is churlish and juvenile, but worst of all, it allows the Liberals to avoid ever coming clean with the Canberra people and telling them whether or not they are happy for us all to remain second-class citizens of this great democracy.
I am more than happy to stand here and say that I do not believe that a senator from Western Australia or an MP from country Victoria should have the right, at the stroke of a pen, to overturn a law passed by the ACT Legislative Assembly; any law, on any subject, without debate, without rationale, on a whim. I am happy to stand up here and say that I do not believe it is fair for ACT laws to be vulnerable to that kind of interference, when the laws of the states are not. And I am happy to see this matter dealt with now.
It is instructive, in the context of this motion, that committees of both houses of the federal parliament have looked at this issue and have recommended that the bill be passed. In the Senate, the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, and in the House of Representatives, the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, have both deemed the bill to be an important reform. Interestingly—and perhaps the Liberals in this place ought to heed this—both committees concluded that dealing with this particular reform now, in isolation, would not impede further reforms in the event of a broader review of the self-government act.
That is why I hope today the Canberra Liberals will be able to say that they are also happy to see this egregious fault within the self-government act resolved, even if other unrelated matters remain unresolved for the time being. Indeed, this motion allows for us to explicitly acknowledge that there is unfinished business. It explicitly states that this is not the end of the matter and that this legislature will persist in its endeavours to have a broader ranging review of the self-government act. There is in fact a growing sentiment for such a review. The most recent calls have come just this month from Dr Allan Hawke, calling for a review in his report on the future of the National Capital Authority.
The Assembly has debated many times in the past some of the individual issues that might be incorporated into such a review. These include the power of the Assembly to fix its own size—again, a matter of principle. Every other parliament in the country can determine its own size. We too should have that power. It may be difficult for us to agree on precisely what size that ought to be—
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