Page 2296 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 1993
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In a further instance reference to the number of the revoked determination would have been helpful and may have avoided a mistake. In two further examples there were unhelpful revocations, inaccurate or incomplete explanatory statements and an error repeated. In a further instance the report asks whether anyone has been overcharged during the year in regard to a particular matter. In a further instance it asks whether something odd happened on the way to publication in the Gazette. Further, the report states that a determination was made under a possibly non-existent Act - not an insignificant matter, I would suggest. On a further two occasions, it states, there were potential problems with an old Act and a new Act. Further, it states that a more detailed explanatory statement would have been helpful in one particular instance. These are just some examples of the comment that was made to our committee by Professor Whalan with respect to our recent consideration of matters.
I would suggest, Madam Speaker, that this situation is not good enough, given that self-government is now four years old in the Territory and government departments have presumably acquired some experience and expertise in preparing these instruments. Mrs Grassby has mentioned a seminar that the Scrutiny of Bills Committee intends to hold later in the year for people who are involved in the preparation of these instruments. Action has already been taken by the Attorney-General's Department also to prepare a paper on the preparation of disallowable instruments, and by the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning, which has developed an internal memo to provide guides to officers on how to go about their tasks with regard to these matters. These will be, and are, helpful initiatives.
However, I believe that it is also appropriate for me on this occasion to draw the Government's attention to the unsatisfactory situation regarding the preparation of these instruments at the present time and to ask the Government to address the issue. It basically means, Madam Speaker, that, if officers are neglecting to do their duties well in response to these matters, the Scrutiny of Bills and Subordinate Legislation Committee has to spend a lot of time actually going through the material and identifying errors so that we can then present a report on our activities and findings to the Assembly.
MR HUMPHRIES (5.11): Madam Speaker, I will speak briefly to support the comments made by Ms Szuty and to confirm the comments made by Mrs Grassby concerning the Scrutiny of Bills Committee's report. We do express concern. We are concerned about the many problems we identified in the most recent batch of subordinate legislation considered by the committee. It is not just a question of being pedantic. The issues that have been raised in many cases are issues about which concerns have been expressed by the committee in very similar terms on previous occasions, often as much as a year ago.
It is edifying to see that things that are raised from time to time by the committee are picked up by those people responsible for dealing with those problems, but when we make recommendations about particular areas where change needs to occur in pieces of legislation it is mortifying to find that precisely the same mistakes are again made in successive years in respect of the same legislation - for example, delegated legislation with respect to fee making. The problems are serious; they are not merely ones that can be just fixed up with a flick of a ministerial determination. It is easy sometimes to go back and do it again and to apologise for, or make some reference to, the fact that there was a difficulty which caused certain problems to arise.
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