Page 600 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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decided they would approve Dr Bourke’s amendment. We get it: you have got the numbers; go for your life. But there was not the tripartisan nature that people want. When you have got the government acting in that way, it is hard to take what they say in good faith.
Hopefully, these amendments to the standing orders will make the system work a little more smoothly. It will be interesting to see if people can take off their political colours as we used to do and try and work for the community and the committee system. I suspect that just the very nature of having two from each party in the committees will make that hard to achieve.
With that, I support the adoption of the report.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.55): I will speak briefly to today’s report, which I will be supporting. On the whole, I endorse the comments of Mrs Dunne, acting in her capacity as Speaker and as the chair of this committee. I think that the observations she has made about the willingness of people to make this work really are the key to it, and I think that these, what I consider to be, fairly minor technical amendments should help facilitate that.
I certainly do not share Mrs Dunne’s commentary on the history of the committees and points that Mr Smyth and Mr Hanson have sought to elaborate and expand on to some large extent. The reality of this Assembly is that we have this balance of numbers. As I have said in this place before—and I will say it again, and I will undoubtedly have to say it again in the future as Mr Smyth and his colleagues seek to re-prosecute this argument and define history in a sense that suits them—there is no reason why a four-member committee cannot effectively function if the members on the committee have a desire to make it work.
I think this goes very clearly to recommendation No 3 from the committee about being unable to agree on a report, and I think Madam Speaker’s comments on this are instructive. In moving to a written statement that does not enable members to attach a dissenting report, it actually puts some pressure on the committee to come up with a report, and Madam Speaker’s observations around the regional report, I think, are a classic example. There is no reason why the committee could not have brought forward a report and said, “We sat on these days, we heard from these witnesses, they made the following observations.” I am quite certain that if those members had really wanted to, they could have come up with some recommendations they agreed on.
Let us face it, regional cooperation is, on the whole, not that controversial. I have no doubt that if that committee tried, there would have been some handful of recommendations they could have agreed on, and then they could have had additional comments that they wanted to make from their own particular political perspectives. But for reasons that only those four members of the committee and the unfortunate committee secretary who had to sit through it will ever know, they could not sort that out.
I agree with Mrs Dunne’s remarks on this. I think that does reflect rather unfortunately on the Assembly and on the committee process. So I hope that these
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