Page 1519 - Week 05 - Friday, 10 May 2019
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We are all acutely aware of how much Canberra has changed in the past 30 years. Our population has grown from 279,000 people in 1989 to over 420,000 now. Our suburban footprint has grown dramatically. Infill is well underway. Light rail, which has been talked about since well before the inception of the Assembly, has now had its first stage rolled out.
I believe that Canberra as a city has finally come of age. I think that this happened a lot during the centenary of Canberra in 2013, when we were all proud to celebrate the centenary of this fine city. I am pleased that since then there seems to be significantly less Canberra bashing by our own population—perhaps others still do it—and a lot more true Canberra pride in what we have in our city.
We are lucky to have an Assembly that is so highly functioning and suitable for the ACT. In particular, being a small jurisdiction and largely a city-state means that all our MLAs are very accessible year round for the public. We all have our offices here in the Assembly, right in the city, and members do not need to spend half their time travelling to their electorates at far distances, as is the case in other states. I am sure members’ families are quite happy about this arrangement as well. Instead of the previous single minister responsible for the ACT who lived somewhere else in the country, we now have local ministers who are easily accessible in our local community and are seen regularly at the local shops, sporting fields, cafes and other venues about town.
The Greens have also had quite a journey over that period, forming after the Second Assembly election and running for the first time in the 1995 election. We have had continuous representation in this place since then and we have been proud to play a role in helping shape the democratic landscape of this place over this period. From our perspective, we understand that the most effective way to implement change in minority government situations is to first strengthen parliamentary processes, allowing policy changes to then be made more easily.
Improving the integrity and transparency frameworks and measures has been particularly important to us, and the introduction in the first parliamentary agreement of the Latimer House principles on the three branches of government, we believe, is especially key to improving accountability and practice in the relationship between the executive, parliament and the judiciary in the ACT. These principles have formed the basis of many reforms that shape our democratic system, such as creating officers of the parliament to ensure that our oversight institutions are given the space and support for playing their independent role as a fourth arm of government. And our ACT Independent Integrity Commission will hopefully commence in just a few months time.
Another example of parliamentary reforms from the 2008 parliamentary agreement is the requirement that no bill will be debated in the same sitting period as it was introduced. This might not seem like a major thing in the scale of things, but for the earlier life of the Assembly up to this period legislation could be brought in on the Tuesday of a sitting period and debated on Thursday, not leaving sufficient time for non-government members to analyse the bill, perhaps liaise with stakeholders, seek the views of the community and negotiate improved outcomes.
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