Page 51 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 16 February 1993
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (8.15), in reply: I would love to pretend that I was aware, off the top of my head, of the information I am about to give but I must acknowledge my indebtedness to the ever efficient Assembly secretariat, who were able to advise me that the answer to Mr Humphries's question about the Common Boundaries Act apparently is that the original ordinance was the Dividing Fences Ordinance 1981. It then became the Dividing Fences Act 1981. Then in that slender piece of legislation, the land planning and management package - of which we have fond memory, having been here debating it until about 2 o'clock every morning over a period of about a week - the Assembly took the decision to change the title to the Common Boundaries Act. The Dividing Fences Ordinance 1981 became the Dividing Fences Act 1981 and had its title changed.
I am not quite sure why the Common Boundaries Act is not in the list of ACT Acts. The list probably needs to be updated and reprinted. We will check the list. The problem is that we did not change some provisions in the schedule to that Act when we changed its title. Obviously, that slipped our attention in the early hours of one morning.
Mr Humphries: It was not a rushed job, was it, Terry?
MR CONNOLLY: Given the period that that legislation was before the Assembly, one could hardly accuse it of being a rushed job.
The substantial point that Mr Humphries made and on which we fundamentally differ is that you should have one amending Bill for each Act. We believe that the process of these omnibus Bills is a sensible one. It is a process that we inherited from the Commonwealth. My understanding is that it is also used by most States. I think it is an efficient way to go about legislation. If we wanted to play little political games and try to compare our record as legislators and law reformers with the record of the Alliance Government as legislators and law reformers, I could embrace Mr Humphries's suggestion and at the stroke of a pen - or at the stroke of very many pens - and at the expense of many hours of Assembly sitting we could have 54 pieces of law reform notched to our belt instead of one, as is the case with this Bill. This single Bill will amend 35 Acts and repeal an additional 19 Acts.
Omnibus legislation is an efficient way of using legislative time in the ongoing process of tidying up the statute books. Mr Humphries made the criticism that this process can never be perfect. He said that you could not guarantee that you had removed all sexist language; so you should not proceed down that track but should wait until you get it perfect. We reject that. We say that it is not a piecemeal approach; it is a process of progressive reform. It would be very difficult to say that you had the entire corpus of legislation in immaculate form. We will always find problems, as Mr Humphries well knows. A provision may sit on the statute books for years, and suddenly someone will look at it and see that it makes no sense at all and should be changed.
This will be an ongoing process. We said in our introduction speech that this Bill would be part of a series of Bills introduced every 12 months or so to tidy up, modernise and simplify the body of law in the ACT. In all of those pages that we see in the red volumes on the table in the centre of the chamber - thousands of pages of laws going back, in some cases, through the imperial Acts application Acts to the 1890s - we will find many errors and anomalies.
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