Page 1916 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 June 1994
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I do not believe that even the Government understands the ramifications of those amendments. If we ever get to the clause by clause consideration of this Bill, I doubt that the Chief Minister will be able to explain many of the clauses, just as she found recently that she could not explain a clause in connection with the Loan Council. It is not good enough to put this sort of thing before the Assembly unless it has been properly thought through and unless the Government knows what it is doing. I submit that again and again they do not know what they are doing with this Bill. It is a Bill that does not reflect anybody's ambitions, certainly not the Government's. If there is any reflection in here of the Government's wishes about this public service that they are trying to create, I would love to know where it is. I would like the Chief Minister to tell me where this Bill sets out what the Government's aims and objectives are. I cannot find them.
Madam Speaker, I am at the forefront of those in this Territory who say that we should have our own public service. I made that clear five years ago. It took the Government two or three years to catch up. Indeed, they are catching up only now, because the Prime Minister finally told them to get on with it, which indicates perhaps why the Bill is so defective. They had no interest in it and no commitment to it. Although it has always been my objective - I believe that it is a necessity - that we create our own public service, I have to say, "Not under these conditions". I do not accept that we should allow second-rate legislation of this kind to go through this Assembly on such an important issue. We are not talking about some minor piece of legislation in respect of which perhaps it does not matter if there is a minor defect or two that you can fix. This is not minor legislation. This is probably one of the most substantive pieces of legislation that this Assembly will ever consider. It is certainly the biggest piece that I can remember considering, not only in the five years of this Assembly but also in many years of previous experience in precedent bodies.
We cannot just write this Bill off lightly. I am quite astounded that the Government seems to be dealing with it in such an arbitrary and ill-informed fashion: "It does not matter what the Government's employees think; it does not matter what the members of this Assembly think; it does not matter what the evidence submitted to the select committee was. Those things are totally irrelevant. The Bill, in its present form, will be passed". That is the Government's attitude. That is not good enough. I do not support that. I only wish that in the three years that the Government had to produce this legislation they had come forward with something vastly better than this.
I do not know what the solution is. The select committee's report recommends that the Government should take a little bit more time out and should get this 1 July date out of its mind as being some immutable target that has to be met at any price. I think that the price will be too great if they insist upon that. The committee has suggested that the Government take some time out to go away and think about the evidence that was put to the select committee - not just to brush it off as being irrelevant opinion, but to accept it as considered, reasoned, logical input to what should be a thinking process; that after they have thought about it a bit they come back and debate it on the floor of the house in an informed fashion. If they are prepared to do that, they will get total support from me. If they are not prepared to do that, they will get total objection from me clause by clause, however long it takes - and that, I submit, is going to be a long, long process.
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