Page 4882 - Week 13 - Thursday, 2 November 2017
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If you look at the motion before us today, we do not believe there is much to base a decision on. Having listened to Mr Coe on ABC Radio last Thursday morning after having lodged his motion on Wednesday evening, I understood at that time that Mr Coe said he was still gathering the details on which he wanted to hang the motion. This makes it very difficult for other members to know exactly what we are supposed to be judging the Chief Minister on.
Let us be very clear here. The ACT Greens are the first to actually want to ensure that the ACT is responsibly managed and governed. We want the highest levels of integrity, scrutiny and accountability possible whilst still running a highly functional government. We put transparency at the very front of our decision-making and have put actions on our words for over two decades in this place.
When it comes to improving the processes of this place, and of this government, I think you will find, Madam Speaker, that the Greens have a solid history and legacy of improvements to integrity and transparency measures to show. These include the FOI reforms, which will bring our legislation from one of the worst in the country to what we believe will be one of the best. This will not be commencing until next year because the public service are preparing for it.
I know that they are now having to reform all their processes and websites so that they can start the push model, making sure that so many of the things that have to be FOI-ed now will simply be uploaded for the public to see as a matter of routine. It will apply the public interest test to each and every item requested for release, with only the very minimum of exceptions, exceptions that were largely added to by the other parties in this place.
The Greens called for an integrity commission as a key priority when we launched our election campaign in the middle of last year. We were pleased to see the other parties in this place also pledge that they would support a commission too, and as we all know, we now have a parliamentary agreement item which led to the committee, which has reported this week. I look forward to the commission being established as soon as practical. I look forward to seeing it as soon as practical.
The Greens also brought forward legislation to establish the Auditor-General, the Ombudsman and the Electoral Commissioner as officers of the Assembly rather than having them sitting under other directorates and having their budgets decided by the executive.
I do not want to bore the Assembly with the details of numerous other reforms that the Greens have pushed through the Assembly on committees and reporting processes. They have all been about making the Assembly more accessible to the public and ensuring greater levels of scrutiny. These are the sorts of integrity measures our community expect of us here in this place.
Coming back to the motion before us today, we do not believe that there is much to judge the Chief Minister by, based on the motion. I will rely on the media release Mr Coe put out last week to construct our discussion today. There are a number of
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