Page 516 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
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The fact of the matter is that the Federal Parliament, the Senate, has a committee that usually looks at regulations passed, such as regulations that could be passed under the Water Pollution Ordinance, to determine whether a regulation is within the power of the parent Act, whether the regulation trespasses on the civil rights of the people, whether - and this is a new advent since the 1970s - the regulation provides an avenue for administrative appeal and review, and the ability to secure reasons, and whether the regulation itself should be an Act of this Assembly, which is the most important thing.
We have created a situation - I am certain I speak for all of the lawyers in this Assembly - unknowingly, where there is a subsisting regulatory power under a whole variety of legislation reposed in this Government without review by this Assembly.
The Residents Rally handed to the Acting Clerk of the house a motion a few minutes ago, calling for an urgent referral of that situation, which I must confess occurred to me only a few minutes ago when I was looking at the ordinance, to the Standing Committee on Administration and Procedures, so that something can be devised and recommended quickly for all-party agreement on the creation of a committee.
The situation with respect to the bringing in of legislation also reveals that there needs to be some prior conferencing and some prior filtering. The parties have discussed this broadly, informally - or individual members have - and I foreshadow a motion to the Assembly seeking to secure bipartisan support for the setting up of a legal review committee along the same lines as the other parliaments in the Commonwealth.
One hopes that that will secure some agreement. That would be a small committee; it would not have staff; it would be basically a members' committee. It tends, in the Federal Parliament, on my information, to be a fairly bipartisan, in-house, non-political event in the House of Representatives. It has, so far as I can determine, gone off the rails on occasion in the Senate and turned into a slightly inquisitorial process. That is not what would be proposed, I am sure, and I enjoin the members of this house to consider both of these matters very carefully.
Firstly, I enjoin the Government to be very wary in signing into law regulations presented to the Ministers in the next few weeks and have regard to the fact that we in the Assembly will not automatically have them referred to us. I ask here in the house that any regulations to be made law by the Ministers sitting opposite us be referred, as a matter of courtesy at this stage, to the members of the house.
Secondly, I hope that the Government will support the notion that we need to resolve all manner of issues, such
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