Page 2403 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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Mr Moore: I said, "How many days to go?".
MR HUMPHRIES: I am sorry. I thought you said, "Not necessarily". One can live in hope, Madam Speaker. The fact of life, though, is that this is not your program for the whole of the three years. This is not what you are going to do over the next three years - or at least that is not what you have told us. This is your program, according to the Deputy Chief Minister, for the budget sittings of this year. This is what you have told the Assembly, and the community, that you hope to achieve in the space of six months. What I am saying, Madam Speaker, is that the program is a totally unrealistic expectation and has been produced simply as a public relations exercise, not as a genuine attempt to indicate to the Assembly, the Opposition and Independents, and to the community, what they can expect to be dealing with in the course of this six months. That is just not the case.
If you want to tell people out in the electorate that a Mental Health Tribunal Bill is going to be dealt with in the next few months, that is great. We will look forward to that. That will be terrific if it actually comes up. We will prepare on that basis. But if, in fact, there will be no Mental Health Tribunal Bill in the course of this six months, then you are perpetrating a deception on the electors of the ACT, particularly those concerned about, and interested in, the fate of Mental Health Tribunal legislation, and you should not be doing it. You should be realistic enough to tell people exactly what they can expect from this Government, not make up a fairy story about what sorts of wonderful things you are promising to do in the next six months but have no intention of doing.
Madam Speaker, I remind the Assembly that legislative programs came about in 1989 as a result of pressure from the then Opposition, the Liberal Party, to have that kind of program put on the table by the ACT Government. In July 1989 I asked what the Government would be doing to tell us what they were planning for the coming sittings and how they were going to present their program of legislation. The Chief Minister said, "Yes, there will be some indication". A couple of months went by, and about halfway through the sittings I said, "We are getting near to the end of the sittings. When can we actually see what you are going to do for these sittings?". Eventually a document was produced. That was the origin of this program.
But I must say that it is not much good unless it actually tells us what we want to know, or what the community expects to know. It is not too much to ask you to tell us what legislation you intend to bring into the Assembly. We are not asking you for any details. All we have - - -
Mr Moore: Did you?
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, we produced a legislative program for every period of sittings of our Assembly. We are not getting many details now. We have the Judges' Entitlements Bill and the law and justice legislation. What is the law and justice legislation all about? What we are asking for is not exactly demanding. We are not asking for leaked Cabinet documents. We might get them elsewhere, mind you. We are not asking for all the nitty-gritty details.
Mr Cornwell: We do not have to. They turn up anyway.
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