Page 1138 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 1991
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requires somebody like me - or, I presume, Mr Connolly and others - to talk to my advisers at length and to find their time. To be expected to do that within a week and then to get back to the Government and say, "Look, here are some of the problems that I want to raise", is inadequate.
At 8.30 this morning, after I had worked on this until well into the early hours of this morning, I mentioned to Mr Rod Woolley of the Chief Minister's staff that I had some major problems with it. It was not until I was able to type out the amendments - because they were not easy to do - that I was able to get a copy to his office, and that would have been about 20 past 10. I think it would have been that late. However, he ought to have been aware for the previous two hours that I did have major problems. I explained that they were not just with the principle that I have talked about, but with some of the drafting sections of the Bill and some of the other things that it carries.
I am intending to move amendments to it. I do have difficulties with the principle of the amendment of this Bill. However, I also accept that, once the Government has made an announcement as to what it is going to do, it has some responsibility to ensure that members of the public do not use the system to take advantage of the Government. So, there is a need for the legislation to go through. I think there is still time for us. I think that the debate should be adjourned. The other possibility that could have happened was that when the Bill was introduced we could have been told that it was going to be an urgent Bill, and it could have been dealt with as an urgent Bill; or we could have been told that there was a matter of urgency and the Government was intending that Bill to come before us both in the in-principle stage and in the detail stage today. Whilst we knew that the Bill was coming up today, it was never clear that that would take us right through the detail stage, until that was explained to me by Mr Jensen this morning.
Mr Speaker, I will be presenting some amendments in the detail stage and I will speak further on the issue at that stage.
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (11.18): Mr Speaker, this City Area Leases (Amendment) Bill 1991 makes a number of changes to the City Area Leases Act 1936. The proposed changes to the City Area Leases Act announced by the Chief Minister bring into effect the new betterment policy arrangements that were announced by the Government in February last year. It was intended to include this change in the calculation of betterment in the proposed planning and land use legislation, but this was postponed by the release of the legislative package for public comment.
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