Page 4714 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Also, Mr Wood has extended the time for consultation on the Territory Plan. This lessens the degree of urgency about this Bill. We believe that the Government should be sensible; it should provide adequate scope, now that there have been two significant changes to the procedures and processes and the timing of this legislation, and the Rally, in particular, should be allowed to go and produce the transitional amendments we seek to make to take account of the flurry of green papers that are now coming down under this Government.
This amendment has the support of the Rally because it will provide more time for this Government to get its act together, it having had sufficient time to work out the implementation phase of the Bill.
We have quite a number of amendments to introduce tonight; in fact, many pages of them. The Minister will have to make a choice as to whether they are introduced and processed tonight. The wording of some of them will commend them to the majority of this house - we have drafted them in the Rally, with our resources - and that will be a decision that the Minister will have to take in a short time.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (8.10): I want to respond briefly. I emphasise that I will be brief because I really want to concentrate on the clauses, on the important debate at the detail stage. Mr Collaery seemed to be complaining, in the last minute or two of his speech, that there has not been time to prepare for tonight's proceedings, for the detailed debate. I heard Mr Collaery, at an earlier stage, claim ownership of this Bill. Indeed, in a speech in the in-principle stage earlier tonight, Mr Collaery seemed to be claiming that this Bill started on a ping-pong table in 1987.
I freely concede that he was part of a government that had a substantial role in the drafting of this Bill, so he well knew what was going on. Mr Jensen, his close colleague, was the Executive Deputy who had a continuing, close and detailed knowledge of and interest in this Bill. Before the Bill was introduced on 19 September, over two months ago, there was consultation with other parties in this chamber and it was pointed out that it was coming down.
We said, "Look, let us keep talking about this; we do not want to get fouled up at the last minute when we are on the detail stage". We introduced the Bill, as I said, on 19 September. We delayed it for a time to allow people, once they saw the final product, to propose amendments. We allowed a further delay when the draft Territory Plan was tabled for further consideration.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .