The Assembly, made up of its 25 elected members (MLAs), perform many functions. These functions can be summarised into three categories: legislation, accountability, and representation.
Legislation
One role of the Assembly is to pass, amend (change), and repeal (remove) laws for the ACT.
Most draft laws, known as ‘bills’, are introduced by the government, specifically ministers. Members who aren’t ministers (non-executive members) can also introduce bills. For a bill to pass and become a law, a majority of the members in the Assembly must vote for it to pass.
Ideas for laws can come from many places including from the members and their political parties, other states and territories, and from the community.
Accountability
Another important role of the Assembly is to keep members, especially those in government, accountable. The Assembly keeps the government accountable through many ways:
- Question time is held at 2pm every sitting day, where non-executive members can ask questions of ministers to publicly scrutinise their performance, decisions, and actions.
- Members can use written questions to seek detailed information from ministers about government activities. Ministers have 30 days to answer a written question.
- Committees can look into bills, petitions, and important issues in the territory. They can also scrutinise the work of government, including through the estimates committee that investigates proposed government spending (the budget).
Representation
One of the most important roles of members of the Legislative Assembly is to represent the people of the ACT.
In our democracy, we vote for people to make decisions on our behalf. This is called representative democracy, and those people become members of the Legislative Assembly. They represent us by making and changing laws, sponsoring petitions from the community, listening to public feedback to committee inquiries, and raising issues in the chamber members of the public bring to them.
You can find your local members’ details on the Assembly website.
