Page 5351 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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If the amendments were to preclude the Government from charging, I would probably support that anyway. But it is important to understand that, as I understand it, Mr Jensen's amendments would not do that. In fact, this is a very sensible method that recognises the cost in terms of community time and balances that against the cost of papers, because the valid point that Mr Jensen made was that often we do not take into account the tremendous amount of time that the community puts into these matters. If we were to put a dollar value on that time, we would realise just how fortunate we are in the community contribution to such things as planning in the ACT.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (11.28): There is always an emotional element in the debate on some of these things, and I think that what we have just heard from two speakers is an appeal to emotion rather than to commonsense. The fact is that it has long been recognised that the implementation of this new Bill will cost a great deal from the public purse.
I see nothing wrong, in principle, with the proposition that someone who wants to take a document away, scrawl all over it, change it and revise it should be asked to pay for it. If you do not want to do that, you can go and sit in a library and read it. Nobody is asking you to pay for that. I just do not accept the proposition that everything that one is entitled to do under the law ought to come free. If we adopted that principle across the whole range of government activities we would never collect any revenue at all - "It does not matter what product we make available, under what conditions it is made available or how costly it is; we just give it away".
I do not see that the charge is at all unreasonable - $20. I imagine that it is a fairly complex document. Most of the documents that we are talking about are probably only a few pages and might be worth 50c or $2. One particular case was mentioned where the charge was going to be $20. That is because it is a very large project and very complex documentation. People might have to pay $20 under those circumstances.
I, as a potential Treasurer next year, well understand how much it is going to cost government to implement this Bill when it becomes law, and I do not believe that, in principle, there is anything wrong with asking people to make a very small, in my view, contribution when they want to participate in the processes that are provided for and prescribed under this Bill. So, I am afraid I cannot agree with Mr Jensen and Mr Moore on this issue.
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