Page 250 - Week 01 - Thursday, 27 February 2014
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MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.18): It is quite interesting that the only argument that you have is to use words like “impossible to deal with the Liberals’ lack of maturity,” or their immaturity, when you cannot actually put a case about what happened. And when you cannot put the case, that makes the point that the four-member committees do not work. You can either stumble along and try and address the outcomes and come up with some sort of patched up system or you address the problem.
In my view, having been here from 1998 to 2012, when all of the committees operated on a three-member basis, normally with one Liberal, one Labor and one crossbencher, the committee system was very strong and produced outstanding reports about delivering better outcomes for the people of the ACT. Unfortunately, the committee system in this Assembly is about producing better outcomes and protecting the government, and that is the problem. We have all signed up to the Latimer House principles, and Latimer House says:
Parliamentary procedures should provide adequate mechanisms to enforce the accountability of the executive to Parliament.
But you cannot do that when half of the committee votes consistently in favour of the executive on party lines. These arrangements of two-all have brought party lines into the committee system—something that did not happen before. Further, the Latimer House principles state:
The establishment of scrutiny bodies and mechanisms to oversee Government, enhances public confidence in the integrity and acceptability of government’s activities. Independent bodies such as Public Accounts Committees …
“Independent bodies”. It is not independent when, in effect, it is controlled or nobbled by the number of government members on the committee.
We can stumble along if you want—and it suits the government’s purpose, Madam Speaker, because they will not get reports that are critical of the government. What committees do when you oversight the executive is to call them to account and hopefully suggest ways of improving it. If you go back through all the committee reports, basically back to 1989, you will see that there were some interesting problems in 1992, just in bedding down the procedures of this place. But since 1995 the committee system in this place has performed very well. From 2004 to 2008, when the government had a majority, we still had a committee system that delivered because it was not nobbled. It is nobbled now, it is broken and it does deserve to be fixed.
Ms Berry makes the case simply by her words. What she has to say does show that it is broken. So we can try and fix it or we can just continue along and we get very low common denominator reports rather than the aspirational reports that the Assembly committees used to produce.
Goodness me, it is a political report! We are a bunch of politicians. Ms Porter laments that it is political. This is a house of politics; it is a parliament. That is what happens. Ms Porter has a different view of what occurred when she says that the Liberals
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