Rating the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly: Is “A Minus” good enough?
Mr Wayne Berry, MLA, in Canberra.
The outgoing Speaker of the Legislative Assembly for the Australian Capital Territory measures up the the standards of the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly against the CPA Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures.
Mr Berry was a Labor Member of the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly from 1998 to 2008, serving as a Speaker from 2004 to 2008.
Introduction and background In 2006, a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) study group hosted by Bermuda pro- duced a report entitled, Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures. Drawing on a range of earlier works including the National Democratic Institute’s discussion paper,Toward the Development of International Standards for Democratic Legislatures, the benchmarks set out a set of best practice standards aimed at providing tools to better assess levels of parliamentary democracy across CPA branches.
The ultimate goal of this exercise
was to increase accountability in Commonwealth member nations through analysis, discussion and review.
The study group considered a range of themes as part of its work and developed recommended benchmarks in relation to:
A.C.T. Speaker Mr Wayne Berry.
• The representative aspects of Parliament;
• Ensuring the independence, effectiveness and accountability of Parliament;
• Parliamentary procedures; • Public accountability; • The parliamentary service, and • Parliament and the media.1
Against this background and after
reviewing the 87 benchmarks set out in the paper, I decided it would be a useful exercise to gauge the Australian Capital Territory (A.C.T.) Legislative
Assembly’s performance against them and provide some analysis as to the areas where the A.C.T.’s form of gov- ernance could be improved.
Findings In reviewing the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly’s performance against the benchmarks,
I applied a broad interpretation of each benchmark that considered compliance with both the letter and spirit of the measures. In doing this I found that there were a number of areas where the Assembly did not