Page 760 - Week 03 - Thursday, 2 April 2020
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than once per fortnight and for a maximum of two hours, with no directorate to appear for more than one hour. In addition, the committee will be advising directorates, as required, of the committee’s intended line of questioning a week prior, to provide some clarity to directorates on which officials may need to be made available. Also, the committee will be considerate of national cabinet and ACT cabinet commitments and not schedule hearings during those periods.
Likewise, all meetings, in line with social distancing, will be held virtually or via teleconference. I think this is a mechanism that allows scrutiny far more effectively and efficiently and in a more agile fashion than bringing the Assembly together more frequently. I also note that those provisions will only be in force whilst the public health emergency declaration is in force. With that, I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.13): The Greens, of course, are also very strongly supportive of starting this committee. There are a lot of distressing things about what is going on at present, but one of the things that are distressing is that in some cases it looks like we are throwing out the idea that we live in a democracy. We have spent many, many years establishing how we actually try to balance all the people’s points of view and all the things that we need to do to keep our society running fairly, well, equitably, sustainably and all those wonderful things.
The Greens strongly support the establishment of the select committee. We appreciate that this is a time of incredibly rapid change. If you look at what the papers said just a month ago, we are literally in a different reality. So it is reasonable that the government be required to take some steps in a hurry, and the impacts of these will be wide ranging and may not always be worked out in advance.
I appreciate that the government has just brought in emergency legislation and I appreciate that this will be passed this afternoon. But in this instance I think we can be 100 per cent confident that, without making any criticism of anyone, in relation to some of the things we think now are the best way of dealing with the situation, in a couple of months time it will become obvious that there were some other options or there were some unintended side effects. There is no way we can change how we run our society, our economy and our government so quickly without doing some things which need, at the very least, more scrutiny.
We also think that it is incredibly important that the public gets some sort of say or some sort of better oversight of what our government is doing. And that is one of the positive things about establishing a select committee. I assume that the committee, as well as talking to members of the government, will talk to members of the community, businesses and NGOs about how this emergency is affecting them and what they think the government should or should not be doing about it.
Yes, I am very pleased that the Greens have worked cooperatively with the other two parties, Liberal and Labor, in the Assembly. I am very pleased that we are not going down the routes of some other parliaments. It is very distressing that the federal parliament was planning not to sit until August and I am very pleased that it seems they may be sitting before that. I am very pleased that we are not emulating the
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