Page 3492 - Week 11 - Thursday, 24 September 2015
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Tuesday matters that have been submitted to the Speaker in the 3 months prior to the meeting, and may choose one matter for discussion.”.
(3) Insert new standing order 69(ga):
“(ga) Matter of public importance (under standing order 79A)
Whole debate. ...........................................................45 minutes
Any member. .........................................................10 minutes”.
The changes that I am proposing today to the standing orders would allow members of the public to nominate topics for one of the two MPI opportunities each week—that is, on a Thursday. The process allows for members of the public to nominate topics for discussion by submitting them to the Speaker. After the Speaker has determined that they are in order, as the Speaker does with other MPIs, they would go to the administration and procedure committee, which would select one for discussion in a particular sitting week. “In order” proposals could be debated for up to three months after they are submitted. This would help ensure that they maintain currency and would also give the committee a pool of ideas to draw on when setting the topic for any one week.
Why is this coming forward? The reason is that I am proposing this as a way to ensure that the ACT Assembly is genuinely reflecting the concerns of the community in the debates we have in the Assembly and providing another simple way for the community to hear the views of members of the Assembly.
I see this as a very positive and innovative engagement tool with our community—a way for them to be able to participate a bit more in the processes that take place in their Assembly. All members of this place talk about how important it is to engage with our community, but there are still very strong divisions between the community and their parliament, and in some ways it can be difficult for the community to feel as though the Assembly is a place they have any influence over.
We do have a petition process, and last term, in my period as Speaker, I was very pleased to move to having electronic petitions. That made that process more accessible to more members of the community. A lot of people found the paper thing, where we had to get it in a particular form, to be a little archaic. The electronic petition process leaps us forward towards modern expectations.
In the petition process, the community can table petitions and then the government is required to give a response. This can be a useful mechanism when calling on the government to do something or respond to something, but it is not necessarily a useful way to start a conversation about an issue. We may not have had much discussion up to that point in time or there may be something members of the Assembly have not given a great deal of thought to. The petition process can also be complicated, despite the provision for having e-petitions. Some groups do not find the formalities of that process very easy, and they have to wait a considerable time to get a response from the government by the time it wends its way through the various processes.
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