Page 5358 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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amendment, and that is why I circulated a separate amendment. So, in fact, I am quite happy to see them voted on separately. But I was seeking to save the time of the house by speaking to the two changes together.
Mr Wood: You can move the second one later.
Mr Kaine: If he goes back to his original amendment No. 14, I am prepared to buy it, but not this one.
MR SPEAKER: We can vote on each of them.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (11.52): Mr Speaker, the difficulty that we have run into here reflects the difficulty we have had for some time. In earlier discussions with Mr Jensen I had agreed to a different subclause. It was one that Mr Kaine had also - and I had not debated this new one with Mr Kaine - found acceptable. But then, in the rush of time, Mr Jensen has come up with a further subclause, and we cannot accept that. Then there was another subclause further down the track. So, we simply cannot accept that.
It is probably appropriate at this stage to say that I have worked as hard as I can on this matter, and I thank Mr Jensen, Mr Kaine and other members of the Assembly for their cooperation in dealing with this matter. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the volume of amendments coming late. We contacted members very early in the piece and asked for their proposed amendments. Mr Jensen's knowledge of the Bill, might I say, is thorough and detailed. He has been actively involved with it over a long period.
Ideally, he should have had all these amendments to me two months ago - or a month ago at the latest. They should not have been coming in just the last week. Indeed, if we had not had an extended debate on the human rights Bill - and I hope that we do not have another one on this Bill - the detailed consideration of this Bill would have been before the Assembly last week. We have been presented with an almost impossible task of trying to cope with these amendments. We want to be as cooperative as possible; but there are absolute limits, and the system has broken down because of late, late, late amendments.
Mr Jensen, I would willingly have accepted, as I did last week, your original amendment; but the two new ones, in the way that they are framed, are simply not acceptable to the Government. Your new wording for clause 22 would have us carry on in a never ending cycle of consultation. We all hold that word "consultation" up in this Assembly as something that is good and proper, and there is no question about that. But there is an end to that line somewhere, and Mr Jensen would try to lock us in to a never ending cycle so that everything simply gets blocked up.
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