Page 2695 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (12.12): As the manager of opposition business and the representative of the Canberra Liberals on the administration and procedure committee, I will speak very briefly to this line.
I think that we have seen in the administration of the Legislative Assembly over the last little while considerable concentration on openness and accountability. We have seen changes to the reporting processes that members undertake. We have seen the lodging online of a range of reports in relation to non-executive members of the Legislative Assembly.
I see that the actions of the non-executive members of the Legislative Assembly, through the administration and procedure committee, have highlighted the difference and disparity in reporting requirements and, in addition to that, the different sorts of conditions that are available to members of the executive. We are starting to see an improvement in the openness of the executive in relation to reporting the expenditure and the like of members of the executive in relation to travel. After a very long hiatus, we are now beginning to see ministerial travel reports again. I think that, following the leadership of the administration and procedure committee, the executive generally is starting to be more open to reporting.
I hope to see a substantial improvement in the executive’s reporting of things like discretionary office allowance or equivalent that the executive may have, the way that the executive deals with postage and communication with people in the ACT, how their telephones and the like are dealt with, and that they are open and that that information is provided to members of the public in the same way we have seen with the non-executive members.
I congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on the progress that has been made in this area, and I look forward to further improvements in the year to come.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (12.15): The Legislative Assembly Secretariat provides us, as members of parliament, with a range of essential services, such as advice, research and policy services, without which we simply could not function as an effective legislature. The Secretariat is made up of the Committee Office, the Chamber Support Office, Strategy and Parliamentary Education, Hansard, Communications and Library, and Corporate Services. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of them most sincerely for the work that they do.
I think the most important point that was made during the estimates hearings on the Assembly was that we are now operating in a parliament that has formally adopted the Latimer House principles, and I am very pleased that the Assembly received all the funding it requested consistent with the Latimer House principles.
It is, indeed, a challenge for us to develop mechanisms that recognise that we are a developed democracy, whilst at the same time building in protections for oversight agencies and accountability mechanisms and, of course, the parliamentary institution itself. The bodies which sit outside the government service delivery program of the
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