Page 1063 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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We do point out to the Government that we will abide by the truncated sitting schedule given to us at the present time but we are willing, with some amendment, which I believe will be proposed shortly, to accept the schedule but not the reasons given by the Deputy Chief Minister.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.28): I did not have a great deal of difficulty with the proposal put forward by the Government in response to my original proposal, and my approach was based on the fact that, as the Deputy Chief Minister says, the number of days' sitting in their proposal was pretty much the same as the one in the proposal that I put forward. I had suggested a fairly regular pattern of meetings, and that was on the basis that I thought the Government would be bringing forward a flow of legislation that we would need to deal with.
I understand that what the Government has done is to come back with a counterproposal which is more heavily loaded in meetings towards the end of the period, and that is based, as I understand it, on the fact that it is going to take them a while to get some of this legislation into the pipeline. If we meet regularly in the early days, we will probably meet with nothing much to do, and we will be making work and simply filling in time which, as the Deputy Chief Minister suggests, we can use better in committee meetings. But in general I had no particular complaint about the alternative sitting schedule put forward by the Government.
I accept the validity of what Mr Collaery says in terms of the Assembly being available to deal with emergencies and all that kind of thing. There is the difficulty that there is no legislation at the moment that allows us to reconvene. But I draw the members' attention to the fact that at an earlier adjournment of the Assembly there were words put into the adjournment that would allow the Speaker to reconvene the house on dates other than those specified or at times other than those specified, if the need arose. I suggest, Mr Speaker, that with an appropriate amendment we can change Mr Whalan's motion to provide for that again.
I have one other amendment that I wish to propose. That is that, instead of meeting in the week of 29, 30 and 31 August, we bring it forward to the preceding week - 22, 23 and 24 August. My reason for that, Mr Speaker, is that the Federal budget is being brought down on 15 August. I believe it is appropriate that this Assembly debate the effects of the Commonwealth budget on the ACT, and that should be done before our budget is brought down. I understand the Government intends to bring the budget down in that last week in September. If we have a week to consider the ramifications of the Commonwealth budget, then come back after having given due consideration to it and debate those ramifications on 22, 23 and 24 August while the matter is still fresh in our minds, the Government then has a month to take the consequences of that debate into account in bringing down its final budget in September.
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