Page 694 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 May 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
be discussed under private members' business on Wednesday morning. It has to be slotted into this 45 minutes that this committee proposes on Thursday mornings, following government business. I believe that that is far too restrictive for so important an issue as the referral of a matter by any member of this Assembly to an Assembly committee.
Another of the three items mentioned at paragraph 15 which would come under this restrictive 45 minutes on Thursdays is this:
any order of the day for consideration of a motion moved upon the presentation of a committee report or the Government response to a committee report;
Again, I presume that a government response to a committee report is not the Government actually responding to it, but perhaps other members wishing to comment on the government response to that report. It is not clear, but that is my reading and I could stand corrected. Again I believe that it is far too restrictive, Madam Speaker, to slot that into this 45 minutes proposed for Thursdays.
The final category that would be slotted in is this:
any notice of motion to disallow, disapprove or declare void and of no effect any instrument made under any Act of the Assembly which provides for the instrument to be subject to disallowance or disapproval of the Assembly or subject to resolution of the Assembly declaring the instrument to be void and of no effect.
That gobbledegook seems to me to suggest that, if we wish to move disallowance on any matter, again we are restricted to 45 minutes on a Thursday morning. We will have a considerable traffic jam of legislation within this 45 minutes.
The committee goes on, almost as an excuse, I suppose, to say that if there is too much in the way of business on a Thursday morning - perhaps the Government is introducing more Bills and the Ministers are all talking for 20 minutes - the Assembly could continue to sit beyond the 12.30 suspension for lunch to deal with the Assembly business.
To my knowledge, this has happened very rarely in the past and I am not so sure that it would be very convenient. Members do have appointments; they do have other constituency matters that they have to consider. It is possible - I grant you that it could be argued - that no member should make such arrangements when the Assembly is sitting; but sometimes, for the convenience of constituents and convenience of appointments, these things happen. Mr Connolly is nodding because the other night he had a 5 o'clock appointment upstairs in his office and, strictly speaking, the Assembly normally adjourns at 5.30.
Mr De Domenico: And for hunger pangs too, sometimes.
MR CORNWELL: Mr De Domenico talks about the need to refuel ourselves with food and drink, and I would have to agree. So, I am not sure that an extension over the lunch hour is all that convenient or satisfactory. The alternative is to postpone the matter until the following Thursday. This does not seem to me to solve anything. The following Thursday we could have another mass of government business coming down which would presumably require us either to go into the lunch hour or perhaps to postpone it to the next Thursday. I find this a very unsatisfactory alternative, particularly bearing in mind the items that
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .