Page 3306 - Week 11 - Thursday, 12 September 1991
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However, to continue: It is a very - perhaps I can adjourn my speech until there is - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR STEVENSON: Why am I doing this? Am I doing it to record it in Hansard, so that at the end of the year it can say that Stevenson spoke on alcohol at some time?
MR SPEAKER: Please continue, Mr Stevenson.
MR STEVENSON: I wonder about the value of continuing. I wonder whether anybody around this place really cares.
If the inquiry that has been proposed by Mr Collaery is to go ahead, I believe that the date should be the end of April next year. That would give some ownership for the new Assembly and also allow time for the job to be done properly. Secondly, I suggest that a better course would be to follow the amendment suggested - it is to omit all words after "that", is it not? - by Mr Connolly. Mr Speaker, could we possibly invoke standing order 39?
MR SPEAKER: Mr Stevenson, you are being heard. I do agree with you, though, about the noise level.
MR STEVENSON: I can hardly hear myself, and I talk fairly loudly. I suggest that the Social Policy Committee, though we are in the middle of an inquiry and though we have the Estimates Committee hearings as well, could fairly readily make some recommendations, and some have already been made. We can just write them out again. That will not take too long.
Mr Collaery: It is too late in the parliamentary session.
MR STEVENSON: To have an inquiry? You say that it is too late in the parliamentary session, yet the original suggestion was to have an inquiry that reports at the end of November. One wonders about the planning of these things.
Mr Connolly: It is a stunt.
MR STEVENSON: Mr Connolly says that it is a stunt. I am not sure that his other amendment is not also a stunt. Nevertheless, what I try to do is get the best out of these things.
The Social Policy Committee could very quickly run over the recommendations we have already made, add a couple to them, take reports from other parties in this Assembly and put out something that will have a beneficial effect. It could report in the very near future - perhaps in a month or a month and a half - with time for this Assembly to vote well before Christmas, regardless of what the Labor Party wants to do in the Assembly, and for this Assembly to implement actions that will have a beneficial effect as a Christmas present to the people of Canberra.
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