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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3436 ..
MR MOORE (continuing):
There are two main reasons for that. The first one is that each and every member here knows about the difficulty of keeping up with our constituencies and working with them to meet the issues there and each and every one of us could work out things that we could do to work better with our constituencies. That is the first one.
The second one is the way that this Assembly works. This Assembly has done a tremendous amount of work in terms of its committee system. In each and every one of the Assemblies, one of the hallmarks has been an extraordinarily positive, extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily active committee system. Mr Speaker, there is no doubt that pressure is felt by all members, but by a small number of members in particular, and that will always happen when we have one of the major parties forming government in a minority situation, particularly with the number of members that we have. Mr Hird covers a wide-ranging number of committees and you, Mr Speaker, probably would be one of the few Speakers in Australia to serve on committees other than the house management committees.
MR SPEAKER: The only Speaker.
MR MOORE: It does have some advantages, Mr Speaker, but that should be a matter of choice rather than of compulsion. We really ought to be facing reality, working in a bipartisan way and saying, "Yes, we know that we do need to increase the numbers." We should not have to wrestle with this situation on a regular basis, whoever is in this Assembly. We should tie the numbers to a ratio, but the numbers of the Assembly should remain uneven. That is something that we could work out if the power were transferred to us by the Commonwealth, as the motion asks our Chief Minister to seek.
Mr Speaker, when I stood to speak, I probably should have clarified that I would be speaking in my executive member capacity as an individual and as an Independent, rather than on behalf of the government. They have their own view.
Mr Speaker, the reality is that we should work together on this matter and we should deliver what we know to be the right thing. The right thing is to have an adequate representation, to tie it to a ratio, to put in some parameters whereby elections always deliver an uneven number of Assembly members, and perhaps only ever jump by two or four so that we are not constantly changing the number of members.
It is something that could be handled easily in an administrative way and it is something that could be handled easily in terms of party politics. It just requires us to take the politics out of such an issue. Mr Speaker, there are other issues like this one that we deal with. We have handed the issue of remuneration to the Remuneration Tribunal because each and every one of us knows that every time there is any suggestion that politicians be paid more the response is horrific. I recall and I am sure that Mr Berry recalls when a member of this house was paid $40,000.
Mr Berry: And a minister.
MR MOORE
: I think it was the same for a minister as for all other members; all of us were paid $40,000. At the time we recognised that that was unfair; but the very first time that somebody suggested that there should be a pay rise for members of the Assembly there was, of course, media criticism and public criticism. Looking back on that, it was
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