Page 4233 - Week 14 - Thursday, 24 October 1991
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The press comments will result in a feature article in the Canberra Times, I am quite sure, which will excite community interest and draw attention to this Territory Plan. I warn members that your constituencies are in here. If you endorse this and give it a blank cheque today, you do that at your own constituency peril. The Residents Rally will not endorse something that it has not read. I call upon all members to support this adjournment. We can take the matter up in November. If anyone wants to say that we have been pressing forever for these matters, they can; but let the Labor Party say where the money is to implement them quickly if we were to pass them all in the next day or two.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (11.11): Mr Speaker, I have to confess that I have some sympathy for the view expressed by Mr Collaery; but I would be more impressed if it were not for the fact that the Residents Rally only yesterday moved some amendments to the Interim Territory Planning Act, and it was quite clear then that they were intending to try to defer the debate on the principal Bill. Mr Collaery talks about ambivalence on the part of the Government and their not knowing what they are doing. One wonders whether the Rally does either, except that perhaps they are playing to a particular audience out there, with an election just around the corner.
Having expressed those concerns, Mr Speaker, I do have some sympathy for the point of view that was put forward by Mr Collaery. As I said in my remarks yesterday, this is important legislation. It may well be the most important piece of legislation that this Assembly will deal with in its first session, and we need to be sure that we are clear on where we are going.
If Mr Collaery were prepared to consider a motion to adjourn the debate to a later hour this day so that he, a representative of the Liberal Party, a representative of the Government, and anybody else who wants to be involved, could sit down and look at the ramifications of continuing or not continuing this debate today, and we could then determine later in the day whether we should proceed with it or not, I would be more inclined to listen. But to simply put forward a blanket embargo on further debate until some future time, I think, is not sufficiently prescriptive and not sufficiently clear.
It does trouble me, I am sure for the same reasons that Mr Collaery is concerned, that this morning we are presented with a thick document and we are in the middle of an in-principle debate. I certainly have not read it; in fact, I have just been reading the first five or six pages and I have already underlined a number of paragraphs and I have questions about them. If that is so in the first five or six pages, I am sure it will be so through the rest of the document. Those questions should be dealt with before we debate the matter in principle on the floor of the house, rather than try to clarify them during or after the debate.
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