Page 676 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
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are encompassed by the Standing Committee on Social Policy. In relation to the membership of committees, standing order 221 states:
Membership of committees shall be composed of representatives of all groups and parties...as far as practicable proportional to their representation in the Assembly.
So the select committee that is being proposed, in my view, is not consistent with those standing orders which we have heard - - -
Members interjected.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, we are to deal later today with the question of the standing orders and their representativeness, their use as a facility for debate and so on. I just put it to the Assembly that the composition of this select committee, as it has been put to us by Mr Collaery, is not consistent with the standing orders that we have before us. It may of course be consistent with Mr Collaery's proposed amendments to those standing orders; I do not know.
Just to summarise, I think that the terms of reference of this select committee are far too narrow to concentrate on what has been acknowledged by the Opposition and the Rally party to be an inadequate piece of legislation. We need a much broader debate if we are to address these social issues responsibly.
I put it to you also that the proposed membership of this select committee is not representative of this Assembly and the community that we are here to serve. It would give, for instance, no voice to the kinds of people who demonstrated here yesterday or today on this very important issue but would instead seek to confine the whole debate to an inadequate piece of legislation by lawyers who are looking at the technical detail, not the significant social problem that the Bill is apparently aimed to address.
MR MOORE (11.19): I think one of the problems we have here is that people are failing to realise that we have a single problem and that we have before us two possible solutions. One is a long-term solution and one is a short-term solution. First of all, the proposal about which the Chief Minister is talking is not a Liberal-Rally proposal; it is a Liberal proposal that the Rally has supported to some extent.
What we have in long-term solutions is a suggestion by the Chief Minister that the Standing Committee on Social Policy should look into behaviour and behavioural solutions. Those long-term solutions will be about trying to get particularly the youth unemployed employed; they will be about building relationships; they will be about building relationships with police officers. They will be expensive. The long-term solution is very important.
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