Page 2691 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 2013
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Committee members as a whole do an outstanding job, and committees have worked successfully with long-established conventions of bipartisanship, balance and collaboration. Based on this week alone, we know this motion would see an end to both bipartisanship and effective scrutiny on standing committees.
Restructuring committees to encourage a more party-political approach, which is what Mr Hanson sees—I am not sure I have ever heard Mr Hanson speak so eloquently about Latimer House principles before—would put at risk their objectivity and could erode the value of the system to the Assembly. It is also a direct challenge to the democratic result that ACT voters handed us last October. It is not only the Assembly which must have confidence in the committees; the community must have confidence in our ability to run an effective parliament.
I reflect on the speech I gave on 27 November last year when I spoke on the motion to establish committees. I said:
… the people of the ACT voted for an eight, eight, one parliament. That is what they get, and now it is over to this parliament to make that work.
I went on to say the committee system allows:
allocations recognising the role that the opposition plays. There is also an acknowledgement that there is a legitimate backbench with a legitimate role in this parliament. That is reflected in this motion.
After responding, I think, to some amendments from Mr Coe, I said:
This arrangement does require the public accounts committee to work cooperatively—
and I am referring there just to the public accounts committee, but I think we can use this argument more broadly—
I think there is the opportunity to make sure that happens. The control and the capacity for that to happen are firmly and squarely with the chair and the opposition and the approach that they bring to the committee's proceedings.
That goes to the heart of what we are revisiting here today—what are the changes that have occurred that require the Assembly to revisit this and, in a sense, to ask what is broken. The feedback from members of the government who sit on committees is that the committee system is working if members choose to allow it to work. Certainly government members are very aware of their responsibilities on committees and the fact that they rely on collaboration and cooperation. But you need all members on committees to bring that same approach to it. I am not sure we have seen that; certainly not in the estimates process.
But what are we trying to fix here? From what I can see, committees are reporting, scrutiny reports are tabled, inquiries are underway, reports will continue to be tabled, as they are every sitting period. But we have to ensure that the will of the people of
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