COMMONWEALTH LATIMER HOUSE PRINCIPLES


REVIEWING THE COMMONWEALTH LATIMER HOUSE PRINCIPLES: THE A.C.T. EXPERIENCE


Having assessed itself against the CPA Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures, the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly submits itself to an external assessment of how it performs against the Commonwealth’s standard for separating the powers of the three Branches of government.


Mr David Skinner and Mr Tom Duncan in Canberra. Mr Skinner in the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly’s Manager, Strategy and Parliamentary Education, and Mr Duncan is the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. A version of this paper was presented at 43rd Australian and Pacific Presiding Officers and Clerks’ conference in Solomon Islands, July 2012.


Each Commonwealth country’s Parliaments, Executives and Judiciaries are the guarantors in their respective spheres of the rule of law, the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights and the entrenchment of good governance based on the highest standards of honesty, probity and accountability.


Latimer House Principle, the


three branches of government (principle No. I)


Introduction and background The genesis of the formal adoption by the Legislative Assembly for the Australian Capital Territory (A.C.T.) of the Latimer House principles can be traced back to two different papers


46 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One Mr David Skinner


presented at successive Presiding Officers and Clerks conferences in 2007 and 2008 by former Speaker of the Assembly, Wayne Berry MLA.1 In different ways these papers set out to examine the extent to which the


Mr Tom Duncan


Assembly lived up to the high ideals of parliamentary democracy, relying on comparisons of its performance against two seminal documents: the first, the CPA study group’s 2006 work Benchmarks for Democratic


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