Page 671 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 1991
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Mr Speaker, this motion was put to the Conservation, Heritage and Environment Committee, and the motion was lost. The standing order still exists. Should anybody again seek such leave, any one person in this Assembly can stop that. That did not happen in this case, Chief Minister.
We have here a situation where there is a chance to compromise; to make this legislation work instead of bullying it through. Nobody has used the bullying tactics, particularly with this planning legislation, up till now. The greatest flak that you have taken was over Labor, and Mr Connolly in particular, saying, "Why don't you hurry up with it?". And they have even backed off on that quite significantly.
It is crazy for us now to push this through and cause contention over this particular matter. For heaven's sake, the compromise is available to us. Why do we not take it? It seems to me that the compromise is not difficult. In fact, the compromise over the whole committee system that we went through this morning is not difficult. Instead of taking a bloody-minded approach to it, if we start to use a bit of commonsense, we will get somewhere with these committees - instead of letting them take the flak and incurring more flak for the Assembly as a whole. I say, "Shame on you".
MR CONNOLLY (6.22): Mr Speaker, one of the most disappointing things in this debate occurred during Mr Moore's remarks when he said that the planning legislation is important and has been approached, by and large, in a bipartisan fashion, and the Chief Minister had apoplexy and spluttered, "What? There has never been bipartisanship; the Labor Party has never been supportive on this legislation". That is simply not true, and the Chief Minister knows it. We have consistently said in debates in this place - and the Hansard records this - that this legislation is broadly supported by the Opposition.
We have consistently stressed that there is a continuum from the work that was done pre-self-government through the period of the Labor Administration through to the Alliance Government planning package. The concept of the planning package to provide for an open and accessible form of approval for and control of land development has always been supported on this side of the house. Our criticism has been limited to points of detail, and the Opposition has, I think, approached this whole package of legislation responsibly and in a bipartisan manner. It is simply not fitting for the Chief Minister, and it ill becomes him, to assert otherwise.
On the issue of the committee, the idea of a select committee was, of course, first raised by the Opposition in about July of last year. That is probably why the Government has such a horror of the idea, because it seems constitutionally incapable of accepting a positive
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