Page 2297 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 1993
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Let me just remind members of the Assembly that today in question time we have heard about a change in the law concerning hand-held radar in the ACT, a problem which has caused the ACT potentially to have lost perhaps up to $1m in revenue.
Mr Kaine: This is a repeat. They had already done it once with breathalysers.
MR HUMPHRIES: Arguably that is so. We cannot look at these sorts of mistakes lightly. They may cost the Territory large sums of money or necessitate the Assembly taking the rather brutal path of retrospectively legislating away a particular legal position that people have enjoyed previous to that particular piece of legislation. Neither of those things makes any of us very comfortable.
Madam Speaker, I think it is appropriate for members of the Assembly to rise to make comment on this latest report and to urge the Government perhaps to think about altering the pace of legislation in such a way as to make it possible to deal with these sorts of issues that are being raised. I hesitate to say this because I know that my friend across the chamber, Mr Connolly, will immediately say, "Quick, quick; slow, slow", as is his wont in these circumstances. But perhaps, Madam Speaker, it is the case that the Government is rushing legislation at some levels. We had the Minister tell us with great gusto - in fact, I think he put out a press release about it - that he had introduced 17 Bills in the Assembly in just 19 minutes. That is a wonderful achievement, but unfortunately sometimes things can go wrong when that pace is being matched by a number of members of the administration who are also trying to keep up with this prolific Minister. So I suggest, Madam Speaker, that care is required, and I hope that this report is useful for the Government and its servants in ensuring that this indeed is the case henceforth.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (5.14): I will quickly respond to this report on behalf of the Government. It obviously makes some important points. It is clearly unsatisfactory when fully 50 per cent of the subordinate instruments brought before the Assembly are incorrect. What has been happening over successive administrations is that, while legislation is centralised, the drafting of subordinate legislation has been decentralised. Most of the subordinate legislation is drafted within the agencies. There has been a response to that which Mr Humphries referred to. My department is preparing guidelines and the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning is running its own internal training course, but that is clearly not producing the goods at the moment.
The alternative would be to centralise the function of drafting all subordinate legislation in my department so that trained lawyers would be doing it. That would add to cost. At the moment often quite junior officers have the task of preparing the instrument, often a simple task which a junior officer can perform, but they can often fall into the trap of failing to quote the earlier determination number or what have you. They are not major errors, not errors that create problems on their face; but they are sloppy. I will look at the practicality - and whether such a move would make more sense - of putting this function back and having all this at least checked by trained lawyers within my department; but, of course, there would be a cost to the administration as a whole in doing that. On the other hand, there is clearly a cost if we get half of our subordinate legislation wrong.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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