Page 578 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
amendment which pushes back the reporting date to later in the year, perhaps to June of 2018, and also to state that the public hearings and calls for submissions should not occur prior to the verdict of the jury being delivered. In effect, there is an option to pass this motion today but the inquiry would not really begin in earnest until after the verdict has been delivered by the jury.
I have had offline conversations just a few minutes ago with Ms Le Couteur. I understand it is her preference not to support that. Rather than go to the effort of seeking leave to amend my own motion, I would appreciate it if Mr Rattenbury or Ms Le Couteur would confirm that it is not their intention to support that possible amendment.
I think it is a reasonable amendment. I think the questions in the original motion such as how is the subject determined, how do they procure facilitators, how do they select the jurors, what information was provided and any other relevant matter are things this Assembly should be across before we get a bill presented in this place that signs up to that process. It would be negligent of this Assembly to entertain a bill based on a process that we are not across.
We could read the website. We could do that, but that is hardly scrutinising as a parliament should. Does anybody know how the procurement was conducted for the facilitators? Does anybody know why it is they went with the times they chose for when the presentations would take place? Does anybody know how presenters were chosen and which ones were not chosen? Do we know about the ins and outs of how the jurors were selected? Do we know which jurors perhaps were ruled out, which ones were ruled in? Do we know that it is actually a fair sample of Canberrans? Do we know why it is the government had some criteria which would exclude some jurors but other criteria that did not seem to be an issue?
These are all live questions. It may well be that there are perfectly reasonable answers to all these questions, but that is what the inquiry would seek to determine. Given that the government has already said they are going to sign up to the verdict, I think it is very important that we get it right.
Regardless of which side of the debate you stand on, regardless of whether or not you think the current CTP scheme works, it is quite possible that the verdict that is delivered is contrary to what you think. The government obviously wants to reform CTP in Canberra. If the verdict comes down as being against reform, I think the government is going to wish that this inquiry had gone ahead. They are going to wish that perhaps there was a problem with the jury process. But we will never know, because we are putting all our eggs in this basket without any real clarity about the process.
Let me stress this: this is not about the core issue of CTP. It is about making sure we get this process right. If deliberative democracy is going to become a function of government, Canberrans need to be able to trust that it is conducted in a fair and impartial manner. I would have thought that if it had been conducted in a fair and impartial manner, the government would want to be spruiking this. They would want
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video