Page 2702 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
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MR WOOD: No, I do not think we will reach that goal, and it is not our intention to do so. If Mr Moore had been following the house and land market in the ACT, he would have noticed that there is a quite large supply of land and houses on the market at the moment. There is probably a note on that program to say that the release dates are assessed as we monitor the need. We have discussed this issue, and we do not think that the community needs 600 sites to be released in October.
Mr Moore: When do you expect to start releasing them? That is what I am trying to find out.
MR WOOD: It will not be this year. That is all I can say.
Plain English Legislation
MR STEVENSON: My question is to Mr Connolly, the Attorney-General. It concerns Canberrans understanding the legislation as it is written. Recently, the Law Council of Australia stated that drafting legislation in simpler, plain English would lead to more people gaining access to justice. I quote from a recent article in the Canberra Times of 1 August:
Council president John Mansfield, QC, said he was hopeful new legislative measures would follow the lead of the Federal Government's Corporate Law Simplification Bill ...
Mr Mansfield said making the language in all parliamentary bills easy to understand would reduce the cost of using the legal system.
This morning the Workers' Compensation (Amendment) Bill was presented. I had a cursory glance at it. One of the clauses was a 58-word sentence. A Bill to do with the Magistrates Court also was presented. One of the sentences in it was 75 words long. I will not read it out, for obvious reasons. Also, the Fair Trading Bill, which is now an Act of the parliament, contained a 150-word sentence followed by a 175-word sentence. I know that we could say a lot of wonderful things about what we are doing to help Canberrans to understand the law; but, leaving all that aside, what is going to be done about helping Canberrans to understand the law and bringing justice into the ACT?
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, I was trying to work out the punctuation to see whether that was one sentence or a group of sentences. It was hard to tell. Mr Stevenson, I share a lot of your sentiments. There is an old homily that says, "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long letter". It is often harder to get a precise legal meaning into a very short phrase. The art of legislative drafting is really all about that. Our style of drafting in the ACT is moving towards a better style, although there are occasions when, as you point out, quite long and
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