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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (23 August) . . Page.. 3286 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Imagine a referendum on a proposal to allow smoking back into enclosed public places. There would be nothing to stop the tobacco lobby mounting a huge campaign to sign up all smokers, a campaign which could not be matched by individuals or groups with opposing opinions, even when the health implications of passive smoking are well known.

A major concern to the Greens also is that the ACT or Australia as a whole does not have formal legislation to protect the rights of minorities or to protect fundamental social and environmental objectives. This bill does nothing to address the issue. The Chief Minister is obliged to estimate the financial costs or savings of the proposed law but no obligation to assess social or environmental impacts.

We are prepared to further examine CIR as part of a broader process of getting more community participation in government decision-making but are not prepared to support this until a number of conditions are met. These conditions include, but are not exclusive to, implementation of a bill of rights, community right-to-know legislation, improved freedom of information legislation, Assembly procedures changed to provide for more involvement by non-executive members in government decision-making, implementation of effective and extensive community consultation processes, and all the issues I have raised about the unequal power of presenting information in the normal way that referenda are presented.

I want to make one point to Mr Moore, who seems to have gone. He put the case very well, but I am interested in his emphasis on contestability and his analysis of democracy and why this simplistic approach of what the people say is not in the interests of democracy. As I have explained already, the serious implications are human rights and what we see civilised society as being.

Contestability is something Mr Moore should think about in terms of the debate we had on the GATS and globalisation. I spoke at length about the democracy deficit being created by internationalisation of policy through the World Trade Organisation. If Mr Moore is seriously interested in contestability and democracy-I think he is, but it probably did not suit him at the time to focus on it-he should look a little bit more closely at the World Trade Organisation dispute-settling process. If he does, he will find that he cannot possibly support the World Trade Organisation and its workings. The dispute settlement process does not allow equal rights for contesting decisions. The internationalism of policy, for Mr Moore's interest, has real implications for the very principles and values he just argued for.

The Greens will not be supporting this bill. I will be sorry if it gets up today, because I think it has serious implications for democracy. It is a populist attempt to convince people that the government is interested in democracy. This government has had many opportunities to show that they are committed to democracy through their own processes. I am afraid that they have not done this. They have been very inconsistent in their commitment to consultation with the community. As I have said several times in this place, they produced a good consultation protocol for one period of time when it was being managed by an officer-I do not know whether it still is-who was very diligent and worked hard to get cross-government implementation of that consultation protocol. (Extension of time granted.) If the government had stayed with that commitment, I think we would have had a much happier community in the ACT.

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