Page 6205 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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members of the committee. May I say thank you to the committee members and may I also say what a wonderful job Professor Whalan does. We are very grateful and lucky to have him. I commend the report to the Assembly.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to add my comments to Mrs Grassby's as a member of that committee, as you are also an august member of that committee.
Leave granted.
MR COLLAERY: I thank members. I want to endorse what Mrs Grassby said and to expand a little on the comment she made about Professor Whalan. In the early days of this Assembly a group of us went across to the Federal Parliament and, through the courtesy of Senator Bob Collins, we watched the operations of the Senate Bills committee, the equivalent committee there. That was a rare example of collaborative activity between the two parliaments. Armed with the information as to how their Bills committee worked, we came back here and our committee was set up.
We proposed very early that we also appoint a consultant, and we resolved fairly quickly that that consultant should be Professor Whalan, an eminent lawyer and an eminent adviser on these matters. Professor Whalan, in fact, has helped refine the legislation of this house more than perhaps anyone else in the last three years. It is Professor Whalan who has saved us from ourselves. It is Professor Whalan who has taken care of the minutiae required of a Bills committee composed of members who are heavily involved in all of their other parliamentary activities.
I believe that the early history of this Assembly will show that we have achieved a great deal of legislation in difficult circumstances, and a full measure of credit should go to Professor Whalan for helping us do that and for helping us to get the legislation, by and large, right not only in its technical drawing but in terms of the protection of civil liberties and the impact on the community.
Again I thank Mrs Grassby for her time as chair. I acknowledge the effective chairing of the committee before that by Ms Maher. I am pleased to say that it is the one committee of this house which has always had a woman chair since the beginning of this Assembly - firstly, Carmel Maher and, secondly, the ever punctual Mrs Grassby.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services): I seek leave to make a statement on this report as well.
Leave granted.
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