Page 3667 - Week 12 - Thursday, 25 November 2021
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23 September
14 October
21 October
25 November
2 December; and
(b) that the additional sitting days place emphasis on matters related to local issues such as those raised by Community Councils and Residents Associations as a matter of priority.
This is an important motion that we will be discussing today. It is not just about how often the Assembly sits but about what sort of Assembly we are, what our focus will be and what matters we view as vital services. As a city, we face challenges and opportunities not seen in other places. As a city-state, we deal with a range of responsibilities that few other single chamber parliaments will ever face. As an Assembly, under the current system, we have to do all of this with the lowest number of sitting days in history. Even in the history of the Assembly, the calendar for next year is a historic low. It is 12 weeks, which is a total of 35 days; 35 days to do all of the parliamentary business of our city-state.
Members, in 1990, in the early days of this Assembly, the Assembly sat for 17 weeks. In 1991, it sat for 19 weeks. In 1992 it was 15, in 1993 it was 15, and in 1994 it was 15. When I joined the Assembly, in the first full year in 2009, we sat for 14 weeks. It is worth emphasising that these sittings were in addition to the rest of our workload. We had full loads of estimates and annual reports. Indeed, in 2009, when I first came to this place, as you will recall, Madam Speaker, we had two lots of annual reports because it was a year following an election. But we still sat for a full 14 weeks.
Our estimates committee was a formally established committee that focused entirely on the budget, in addition to the standing committees of the day. They were long days. We would regularly sit past the dinner break to get through the workload. We do not do that anymore. So not only are we sitting fewer days but also the days themselves are much shorter than the days that we used to sit. We regularly came back after dinner, as they do up on the hill.
This is a low point in the history of this Assembly, both in terms of the number of days and how long we sit on each of those days. It is not just low by our own standards; it is low compared to other jurisdictions. In New South Wales they sit for a total of 16 weeks—15 joint sitting weeks, plus an extra week for their Assembly. They do not deal with local council matters; they are just focused on state matters.
In Tasmania, with a similar population to the ACT, they sit for 15 weeks and, again, they are not having to deal with council matters. In Western Australia they sit for 19 weeks and, again, they have local councils for those issues that they are responsible for. I know that those states have larger populations, but if they are only focused on state matters, essentially, in terms of their jurisdiction, they only have half the responsibility.
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