Page 542 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 June 1989
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I would submit, Mr Speaker, that the Minister should have had her own department bring forward a proposal on these matters. If the Minister is not going to do this sort of work, what is her department doing? How is a single secretariat clerk, servicing the Standing Committee on Conservation, Heritage and Environment, to deal with this matter by 31 October, when only yesterday we referred to it a matter raised by Mr Moore - a matter which is at least of equal importance? We thought that it would take until the first sitting day of 1990 to do the inquiry that Mr Moore put forward. But we now have an inquiry put forward by a Minister that will pre-empt that dealt with yesterday. The Minister, with the entire resources of her department behind her, should be putting proposals to this Assembly and not asking the secretariat of this Assembly to do her department's work for her. I think there is a real question about whether under the circumstances we should be asking this committee to take on this task in the time scale that is prescribed.
The second and more interesting point that I want to allude to is why this matter was put forward this morning at all. I refer to the daily program and the notice paper. I would submit to you, Mr Speaker, that if this matter had not been brought forward for debate this morning we would have concluded our day's business by 11 o'clock. I submit that the only reason this matter was brought forward was that the Government and the Minister knew that, if you throw the hare out, the hounds will chase it and we will use the maximum amount of time that can be used on this subject so that everybody can say their sixpennyworth on the matter of heritage - a very trendy subject which is guaranteed to use up all the time available.
What we have done is very interesting. We have let the Government off the hook in terms of its not being able to produce enough business to keep this house busy. We have used up most of the morning on this subject which, in my view, should have been the subject of a proposal being put forward by the very Minister who has proposed it.
I submit, Mr Speaker, that we have here a symptom of the difficulty of conducting the business of this Assembly. If the Government does not have the amount of business to put before us, then I submit that it should be doing some work to produce it. It should not be dreaming up schemes to use up the capability of this Assembly - the members of this Assembly, the limited secretariat of this Assembly - on matters like this where the Government itself should be doing some work. I think it is a cop-out on the part of the Government, and it will put an enormous workload on a very limited secretariat to complete a task which is the Government's responsibility.
It is appropriate for the non-Government members on this side of the house to put forward matters of inquiry because we do not have the resources to do it ourselves. But for a Minister of the Government to put forward a proposal like
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