Page 1811 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 1 May 1991
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this Assembly, and I would welcome suggestions from members. My informed advice - and I rely on that advice - is that there are too many amendments to put forward to the Berry Bill and that there are a number of other issues, as I stated in the house and as can be discerned from Hansard. Mr Berry's Bill, Mr Speaker, may well get the support of this house when it is in sufficient form to meet the needs and the aspirations that he seeks.
MR MOORE (11.38): Mr Speaker, I find it difficult to believe the duplicity of Mr Collaery on this issue, having just heard the Government vote and him vote when we talked about the need for more time for communities to respond to variations to their schools. As far as Mr Collaery is concerned, they have to go through much, much more work without the sort of support that he has, and he is going to give them three weeks.
He has had well over three weeks already, and he comes back to Mr Berry with this very vague talk: "I have talked to some people who have some relationship with the law". It could be police, it could be lawyers, it could be judges, it could be prisoners, it could be a whole range of possible people. It could be his Law Office, but the point is that he has a Law Office that supports him. He has an opportunity, and has had an opportunity, to look through Mr Berry's Bill. He recognises the importance of the concept, and I certainly give him credit for that. He mentioned that earlier, and quite rightly so.
For a long time I have known that Mr Collaery has supported the need for a facility, such as the one that Mr Berry has proposed by the intent of the legislation. It seems to me, Mr Speaker, that the appropriate response for the Government would have been to prepare the amendments, give them to Mr Berry and allow Mr Berry then to come back to the Government - this is before we had to sit - and say, "Yes, we agree with this; we agree with that", or for the Government then to flex its muscle and say, "We are going to modify Mr Berry's Bill in this way and that way and the other".
It would have been quite simple. But, no, what Mr Collaery is doing instead is that, when a private member's Bill or a private member's motion that he actually likes comes up, he thinks to himself, "How can we, as the Government, take this over and make it our Bill?". So, the only way to do it is to delay and to turn it around and to introduce a new Bill in his name that does all the same things with a few modifications. We have certainly seen examples of that before. Mr Kaine often draws the house's attention to the fact that Labor rarely supports the Bills of the Government, and we really have to ask ourselves why it is then that the Government, in a case such as this, is reluctant to support what is obviously a very good idea. It is a well-drafted Bill and Mr Collaery draws attention to a couple of problems - and that is what there are; there are a couple of problems.
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