Page 2736 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
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Madam Speaker, no doubt, in two years' time, members of the Assembly will be looking at this legislation again and trying to deal with both of these issues to see how successfully we have managed with this Bill. The reason why clause 3 is in there is that all of us who have looked at this legislation and Balancing Rights and have been through the whole process say, "We do not think we have all the answers. We are going to have to try to improve on what we have" - I believe that this Bill is a significant improvement on what we have - "and put more safeguards into place. Then we will review it, see whether it is working and see how it needs to be modified". Madam Speaker, it is for those reasons that I feel very comfortable about supporting the passage of this Bill.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (4.53), in reply: Madam Speaker, as members understand, I have, shortly, to leave the house. I am closing the debate, although I understand that Ms Ellis, as chair of the committee that did such a sterling job, would also like to make some remarks. I ask the house to extend her that courtesy.
I thank members very much for their cooperative approach to this legislation and to the whole process. It has been a massively complex exercise to get modern mental health legislation into this Territory. It is a job for which no one person can claim credit. The need was recognised upon self-government. Work was done in the period of the first Follett Government to start to address it. That work was picked up and run with during the time that the Alliance was in office. The Balancing Rights exercise was commissioned. It reported. For a period of about 18 months, I worked very closely with Wayne Berry when I was Attorney and he was Health Minister, because a comprehensive approach to mental health involves close cooperation between the Attorney-General's Department and the Health Department.
I should put on the record that my senior private secretary, Jo Baker, and Wayne Berry's senior adviser and then senior private secretary in the ministerial office, Sue Robinson, worked extremely closely over a very long period to drive this process. Inevitably, in a exercise like this, there were a lot of points at which departmental interests were clashing. They could easily have bogged down into years of IDCs. The process was driven very effectively by the two ministerial staff officers. Mr Cashman and the team of lawyers in the Attorney-General's Department have done sterling work on the policy aspects of this Bill over a long time, particularly during the period when it was before the Assembly committee.
The chair of the Assembly committee, Ms Ellis, did an extraordinary job, with the cooperation of all members of that committee, in pulling out a compromise and a synthesis of very difficult and, often, conflicting views. It is a matter of some credit, I think, to this Assembly that we were able to deal with such a complex matter by way of an exposure draft of legislation, a committee process at which there were very long and protracted hearings, a committee report which was able to come down unanimously on such a difficult piece of legislation, and a Government response which was able to pick up all of the issues of substance from that committee.
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