Page 468 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 15 February 2017
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Of course, we accept that having a parliamentary agreement is a legitimate mechanism between parties. In actual fact, to an extent it does provide some transparency as to what is actually a bond between those two parties. It is well known, of course, that the Liberal Party and the National Party have a written agreement and it forms the coalition government.
The need for these documents to be present and to detail exactly what policies should be pursued is something that is a hallmark of this Assembly. I think it is actually a credit to the two governing parties here that they do make it a transparent document so they can be held to account.
However, there are some specifics in this particular agreement that I think warrant some attention, not the least of which is part X. Part X does, in effect, bring into question the independence of the Head of Service. That the Head of Service is being required, as a result of a deal done between Labor and the Greens, to commit their time to assessing a party-political document I think is inappropriate.
Where does it stop? Does it stop with just the Head of Service or should another of the more than 20,000 territory public servants be involved in this party-political document? It is a party-political document. The agreement is between the leader of the Australian Labor Party and ACT Greens members. It was not between the Chief Minister and a crossbench member; it was between two political parties.
This is made even clearer by Part XI, which is about how the document should be amended. It says:
This agreement may be amended by agreement between the parties. Any proposed amendments shall be put in writing by the party making the proposal. The parties will undertake discussions of amendments in good faith.
It is all talk about parties. It is a party-political document. That is, of course, what has been the tradition in this place. We had this discussion in the Assembly back in 2010. Mr Rattenbury, who was the Speaker at the time, said the following:
… with regard to a reference to party matters, I ruled part of a question out of order on the ground that that part referred to a matter, namely the Greens-ALP parliamentary agreement, for which there was no ministerial responsibility … Although Ms Gallagher is connected with the agreement, as the ALP’s liaison point, I do not believe that this meets the requirement of being officially connected in the sense of having ministerial responsibility.
There was a subsequent debate about whether any minister did actually have carriage of this agreement. What was, in effect, the position was that particular issues within the agreement, the substance of the agreement, have a relevant minister. For instance, if there is a component in it about light rail there is obviously going to be a minister for transport who is responsible for that. But the agreement as a whole was deemed not to have a relevant minister. That is clear in the administrative arrangements, which of course do not list anybody as responsible for cross-party relations or for the parliamentary agreement.
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