Page 2525 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 15 November 1989
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body. It is an instrument to offer advice to the Minister responsible for the environment.
I have to say at the outset that that does not accord with my belief that bodies of this kind ought to have some real power. To establish advisory committees is not a desirable trend; it is not a suitable way of getting decision making done. On the experience of those people that have sat on such committees - I know that at least some of the members of this place have sat on advisory committees before; I have not, but I rely on the judgment of people that have - the impression I get is that such bodies tend to be somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They tend to have no responsibility because they have no power. It seems to me most important that, if we are to give people power, they ought to have responsibility; the two things go hand in hand. I believe that, if we trust in the expertise, the experience and the general understanding of the issues of the people that we appoint to such bodies, we ought to be able to give them some responsibility.
The problem with advisory councils or advisory bodies is that, because they are advisory, they tend to want to choose easy options and to avoid having to make hard decisions. It is very easy to make a decision which is good and then refer that to a Minister or some other person who the advisory body knows will have to take a more hard-nosed approach. For that reason I am concerned about the nature of an advisory body.
In the other policies of my party we make reference to the appropriate governance of important parts of the Territory's infrastructure. We talk, for example, about schools and say that school boards with real powers ought to be established and maintained. We talk about our hospital system and we say that in the hospital area we ought to have hospital boards of management which have real power over the day-to-day running of our hospitals. We reject the idea that at that level advisory committees ought to be established to tell Ministers, who are necessarily more remote from the day-to-day problems of those areas, what should be going on. Mr Speaker, that is the first point.
The second point is that bodies of this kind, where people are appointed on the basis, as the motion says, of their being members of "relevant environmental and development groups", necessarily have a tendency to be politicised, and that is a matter of regret. I do not think any of us in this place would be unaware of the danger of debates of this kind being politicised by adding people who are expressly there to represent particular political points of view. I think that this is the only way we can interpret that reference to "relevant environmental and developmental groups". It must be seen as a dangerous pitfall and must be seen as a way of threatening the politicisation of the project, as we can expect the environmental representative on this committee to be arguing the environmental side to
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