E-petitions

Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I would like to speak briefly on the motion that the proposed standing order recommended by the Procedure Committee in its E-Petitions report that was tabled last November be adopted to come into effect upon an e-petition system going live on the Legislative Council website. I think it is a great leap forward for this chamber, having been here for a while. I acknowledge Ms Patten for bringing the motion to the house that the Procedure Committee look at this issue. As she said, it had been looked at by the Standing Orders Committee of the Assembly quite a long time ago — eight years ago — so it has been a long time in arriving.

I was listening to Ms Patten talk about young people looking bemused when she was talking about paper petitions, but I think there probably will still be some paper petitions because they are very good things to have on stalls et cetera, so perhaps the day of paper petitions is not completely over.

We will probably never again see anything like the Women's Petition — the giant, massive Women's Petition — immortalised in a scroll and a replica across the road from Parliament House.

In the debate on this motion many of us spoke about the existing arrangements in other Parliaments, such as in the United States where if there are a certain number of petitions, it triggers a response from the White House, which is very interesting. There are various arrangements in Parliaments and more and more Parliaments are taking up e-petitions. I do not know that it is necessarily the end of the story with petitions, because on many occasions when paper petitions have been tabled in the Parliament there have been motions moved to take note of them. I have done that a lot myself, and I think on every single occasion I took the opportunity to say, 'Wouldn't it be good if we had e-petitions?'. It is great that we are getting there.

I would like to thank Andrew Young, Anne Sargent, Vivienne Bannan and other members of the Clerk's team for the work they have put into this. I would also like to thank Tim Swanson and the IT team, who have done an awful lot of work to bring this into being. I am sure they have enjoyed it because it is part of their remit to innovate IT in the Parliament. I am sure that would have been a great project to be working on. Early on they went to the trouble of showing the Procedure Committee a prototype of how it would work and of getting some feedback from us including, as Ms Wooldridge was saying, trying to replicate the current paper system electronically. In the last couple of weeks they came to meetings organised by the Clerk's office and the IT staff to run us through what it is going to look like. I think everyone will be really excited when it is up and going. It is great that the Legislative Council is leading the Legislative Assembly in this regard, but I really do hope the Assembly catch up with us pretty soon. It is a great step forward.

Motion agreed to.