Page 1961 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 24 October 1989
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He talked about the steps that he has taken to have these matters discussed. "For the last couple of weeks", he says, "we have arranged meetings of all of the members to talk about the Bills that are being brought forward in this particular week". Indeed, there was discussion on Monday night at 5 o'clock when, for 20 minutes, 16 members of the Assembly met to talk - - -
Mr Wood: Was I the only one not there?
MR KAINE: Mr Wood obviously did not need to be there. He is fully briefed by the Government, I am sure, and I am sure he gets plenty of consultation with the four members of the Executive on what is happening. But it is absurd and spurious for the Deputy Chief Minister to claim that, because we have 20 minutes sitting down talking about this week's legislative program at 5 o'clock on Monday night, that is adequate in determining the content of the legislation that the Government is putting forward.
What that meeting was for was to determine the order in which it would be discussed and debated. We did not talk about the content of it. If the Deputy Chief Minister is suggesting that 17 members of the Assembly should sit down on Mondays and debate the content of all the legislation that it is going to debate for the rest of the week, his proposition, I repeat, is absurd. That is not what the meeting on Monday night is for.
There was a meeting on Tuesday last week, which the Deputy Chief Minister says was requested by the members of this house. That is simply not so. I got a message that the Deputy Chief Minister wanted to have a meeting a week ago today to talk about the program. The only member of the Assembly who asked for it was the Deputy Chief Minister, and he clearly wanted to get himself off the hook because, as organiser of the Government's business, he was getting some severe criticism from those sitting on the opposition side that they were not being adequately informed on what was going on.
So this last-minute, belated attempt to claim that we are consulting by having a meeting once a week is a nonsense. The Deputy Chief Minister said, having put the legislation out, "It is up to the opposition to consult with community organisations and other interested organisations out there". That is very interesting, because it is not the opposition that undertook to consult with the community organisations on the Government's Bills. It is the Government who said, "We are open and consultative and we will talk to these organisations".
The Deputy Chief Minister referred to a Bill that was discussed at lunchtime today. I will name it. It was the Payroll Tax (Amendment) Bill. He claimed that we came up with some problems at lunchtime. We did not come up with some problems at lunchtime. What has happened is that all
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