Page 710 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 May 1992
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There are a couple of matters that I should take up from the Scrutiny of Bills Committee report. One grammatical error which has been picked up by Professor Whalan, whose eagle eye for detail is well known to any members who have served on that committee, is that at page 9 of the amending Bill we say, "Insert 'her' after 'him'" rather than "Insert 'or her' after 'him'", so if it were let go it would read "him her" rather than "him or her". But I am advised by officers of the chamber that standing order 191, which covers grammatical or typographical errors, can be called into aid there and, the error having been pointed out, it can and will be remedied.
In relation to the Canberra Theatre Trust Act, I have asked the draftspersons about that. They are not sure that the suggested criticism is the case because, as the committee says, they have not been able to discover whether other sexist language has been removed; the problem is that they are working from a last reprint rather than necessarily the current form of the Act. If there are still items of sexist language lurking in Acts, further measures will be taken to remove them. We probably cannot be confident that we have removed sexist language totally until we complete the process of getting all the laws of the ACT on the electronic database, which will allow us to do an electronic check through every word; otherwise the process would be to send an unfortunate legal officer to sit in a corner and commence at volume 1 and work through to volume 13 looking for "he" without the equivalent "or she", or perhaps better still "the person", to use appropriately gender neutral language.
While we are picking it up where we are aware of it - that is one of the prime objects of this Bill - there may well be areas of ACT law which still use inappropriate non-gender-neutral language. Rather than having a massive, laborious task of manually checking every law, it may be more prudent for us to complete that task when we have all the laws on the database. That is a very important goal of this Government, as we said in our legislative review statement to the Assembly last year, which represents a very clear policy statement of achieving simpler laws which are easier to read and which use language that is appropriate for the last decade of the twentieth century; rather than some interesting, antiquated language. But I can reassure Mr Humphries that we still have no designs on the 1256 statute about which he was so enthusiastic some time ago.
So, I commend the Bill to the house. The criticism that Mr Humphries makes about the undesirability of moving rapidly on this type of Bill is a fair one which the Government takes and acknowledges; but it justifies action on this Bill because of the potential confusion in the criminal law which would occur if we did not correct the misnumbering of sections of the Crimes Act which occurred in the somewhat confusing last days of the last Assembly when a party who is no longer present was furiously moving private members' Bills and often amending those Bills several times during their process of passage. We hope that we do not get to that position again.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Leave granted to dispense with the detail stage.
Bill agreed to.
Sitting suspended from 11.58 am to 2.30 pm
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