LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM
751. Mr R.S. LOVE to the Minister for Local Government:
I
have a supplementary question. Does the minister admit that by persisting with
his plan to force local governments to adopt ticket voting, he is
deliberately politicising local government?
Several members interjected.
The SPEAKER: Order, please,
members!
Mr J.N.
CAREY replied:
What
I said before about the member for Moore is that, quite frankly, he has
underlings who write his questions and then
he reads them like a robot—bit by bit. I want to be very clear on this:
this is starting with a three-month consultation.
Mr R.S. Love: It looks like
handwriting to me!
Mr J.N. CAREY: I am sure you
do not write any of those questions.
We
will have a three-month consultation to engage the sector on these reforms. The
idea that there is not politics in local government or, for that matter,
that there are not group tickets or how-to-vote cards in the electoral system—it
is very evident there.
Several members interjected.
The SPEAKER: Order, members!
The Minister for Local Government is answering the question. He has a very
brief time left to conclude and hopefully we will have no further
interjections.
Mr J.N. CAREY: We have
extraordinary statements of an opposition that claims there is no politics in
local government. A high number of ''Clan'' candidates have run
in the last local government election, and some of them were elected. There are
a huge number of Nationals affiliates in the regional communities, in those
local councils, and I work with them, but
there is this idea that there is not politics in local government. We want
transparency in the system. We want clear transparency. If people are
going to ask people to vote a particular way, it should be accountable to ratepayers.
What is very clear is that the Nationals WA do not support transparency in the
system. They did not bring these reforms in. They sat there, got their belly
tickled by the Liberal Party and did what they were told on forced
amalgamations. Only a McGowan government will deliver reforms to the local
government sector that we desperately need and that the ratepayers are
demanding to be delivered.