Page 3682 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 20 October 1993
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MOTOR TRAFFIC (AMENDMENT) BILL (NO. 4) 1993
Debate resumed from 16 September 1993, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
Debate (on motion by Mr De Domenico) adjourned.
INSTRUMENTS (AMENDMENT) BILL 1993
Debate resumed from 25 March 1993, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.08): My party is happy to support the Instruments (Amendment) Bill. The Bill does a number of things of varying degrees of importance. Perhaps the most significant is to provide the Registrar-General, as he is now to be called, with the capacity to destroy or to dispose of documents in certain circumstances. At present, as the Minister explained in his presentation speech, there is a problem in that such documents hang around after they have ceased to be of value. They are kept on the record for the sake of completeness, perhaps, in the records, and the inevitable result is an accumulation of outdated security documents, leading to storage problems and delays in access to documents by people who want to find out what is available.
Madam Speaker, it is appropriate that there be some capacity on the part of the Registrar-General to deal with those documents when they are clearly of no further value to the people lodging them or to anybody else. Proposed subsection 36A(1) sets out three circumstances in which the Registrar-General may dispose of documents. They are that the document has been discharged or satisfied; that the Registrar-General believes on reasonable grounds that the document's security - that is, the chattels or other securities referred to in the instrument - is no longer affected by the instrument; or that a period of not less than 10 years has elapsed since the date of the registration of the registrable instrument. They clearly give the Registrar-General the power to dispose of documents which are no longer relevant and no longer needed.
There is a problem with paragraph (c). I understand that the Minister proposes to delete paragraph (c). Obviously, some documents may be 10 years old, but the matters which they affect, the chattels or whatever it is that they affect, may still be on foot and require that the documents themselves be preserved. I think the power conferred on the Registrar-General in paragraph (b) is sufficient to deal with that situation. Madam Speaker, this Bill provides for more efficient operation of the Registrar-General's Office and, as such, it has the support of my colleagues and me. The amendment which we had commissioned will be covered, I understand, by the amendment of the Government and, as such, we are happy to support this Bill.
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