Page 1427 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 26 September 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
There is a basic inequity in the LA(MS) Bill. While the Government is free to hire as much help as it wants under the banner of consultancies, we in the opposition have no such freedom. The Bill is, of course, patterned on the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act in use in another place. That Act may suit the purpose of Ministers and members in that other place perfectly, but the Government seems to have had little consideration for the special requirements of this small Assembly, its small membership and the very great diversity of information sources and pressures placed upon us to deal with the vast range of issues affecting this Territory.
The Government may be indifferent to such concerns, as is clearly represented in the manner in which it has introduced this Bill, but we are not. It is unreasonable to expect an MLA, who is entitled to one staff member, or even one and a half staff members, who can offer that staff member a limited salary, to find someone with full experience in all the tasks involved in servicing a political office.
On the other hand, the Government has a more generous staffing allowance. It has some 17,000 public servants to rely on. Then it wants to award its Ministers in this Bill the right to consultants at any time that they want to call them in. The Assembly needs to be asking, "Who really needs consultants?". Is it Ministers with all the support base they have, or ordinary members of this place who are forced to rely on their own scarce resources in the Assembly to assist in the very vital committee work and other matters that they contribute to?
It is the opposition who require the freedom to hire specialist consultants for particular tasks when they need them. It is the ordinary members who should have the choice as to who works in our offices and what they do. Our priority is to provide effective and informed opposition. How we do that should be a matter for our own judgment and should not be up to the Government to decide for us.
We have previously heard from this Government on the question of consultants. According to the Government, consultancies are all about tax minimisation. There was a heavy emphasis in the Chief Minister's speech on tax issues, yet this Government itself does not baulk from hiring its own consultants and, of course the opposition is aware that the Government hired a consultant to present its initial draft budget strategy.
Fundamentally, the Government knows that tax minimisation is not the issue in this matter, yet it throws the label of tax minimisation around when consultancies for the opposition are mentioned, in the hope that someone will think that we are encouraging tax avoidance. That, of course, is a very different question and a slightly hypocritical stance.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .