Page 2860 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 1991
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subject to the Federal Companies Act. That was an effective cure to the situation, but it closed the stable door after the horse had bolted and it leaves a sour taste, in the minds of many people in this Territory.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (11.15): Mr Speaker, the Liberals in opposition support this Bill. Of course, we support it for the reasons fully outlined and explained by the former Attorney-General, Bernard Collaery. This Bill is about accountability - accountability for privately owned money that happens to be invested in cooperative societies of one kind or another.
As Mr Collaery has pointed out, in the past it has been possible for the directors of cooperative societies to act without necessarily consulting or revealing fully to the owners of the money what it is that they intend to do and what the outcomes of their decisions are. It was for that reason that the previous Government moved to fill that gap. It was for that reason that this Co-operative Societies (Amendment) Bill was brought forward. The new Labor Government has seen the sense of it and brought our legislation forward, as any sensible or reasonable people would.
I do not think that I need to traverse again the matters that Mr Collaery has spoken of and which led to this Bill being drafted. I think it is sufficient to say at this stage that the Liberals support it, it was necessary and it needs to be put into place.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (11.16): Mr Speaker, I rise really to take up some of the comments that were made by Mr Collaery in his, I think, very valuable contribution to this debate. I do not want to revisit the issues of the Canberra Building Society exercise of last year. I should perhaps say that, like many Canberrans, I was a mortgagee from that society, and thus a shareholder, and thus disclose any interest that would be relevant to my saying that I do not want to revisit those events. So, I put that on the record.
But the important point that I think Mr Collaery was making was that there has been a very significant development in national control of company law in Australia in the last couple of years and that the often very important financial institutions that fall outside the conventional company structure are somewhat left behind.
I was fairly closely involved in the legal challenge surrounding the national companies legislation because I was part of the legal team that was arguing that case for the Commonwealth - which, of course, we eventually lost. But it was interesting, as that was being developed and we were looking at corporate regulations in other parts of the
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