The Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, condemned yesterday an idea floated by the Opposition to abandon Westminster system in the ACT Legislative Assembly.
The Leader of the Opposition, Kate Carnell, said earlier that the people of Canberra did not like the hierarchical system of Ministers and the adversary Westminster system in the Assembly. She proposed that a system of committees replace Ministers and the rigid party structure.
Ms Follett said the democratic principles of responsibility and accountability to the community disappear.
Ms Carnell told Matt Abraham on the ABC that Canberrans wanted a flatter structure that was more consultative and more co-operative. But they wanted input in structured form The Liberal Party had not got a definite policy on it yet; it was floating ideas.
Party-line politics was not suitable in the ACT because there were only 17 MLAs from which to chose a ministry. That was a small talent pool, and even smaller if chosen from the eight to 10 government members.
Under her idea, the Assembly would determine the committee’s make up of, say three or so, MLAs for each portfolio area and would require them to provide certain basic functions (presumably those provided by a single minister now). All other functions would be like the present committee system. Any MLA could nominate, but only for one or two committees each. Each committee might have, for example, one Labor, one Liberal and one Independent.
Each committee would elect a chairperson. These would make up the executive who would elect a chief executive, or “”chief representative”.
The other possibility was a other poss was a directly elected Chief Minister and chairs of committees would go to the next six highest vote getters.
Ms Follett said, “”In this country elections are held on the basis of known policies . . . . Governments ought to be judged on the implementation of their stated policies _ otherwise the political process is reduced to a succession of empty policies.”
Horse-trading and back-room deals would undermine the implementation of the majority party’s policies that had been approved by the voters. Responsibility for decisions would be blurred. It was an “”all care and no responsibility” approach.
Ms Carnell said the ACT had inherited from the Commonwealth a huge amount of process and not a lot of “”pointy-end” delivery. She said the Federal Liberal Party would support sensible changes to the Federal Parliament’s ACT Self-Government Act. If changes were not approved by the Federal Parliament, an ACT referendum could be held to force the issue.