Page 4049 - Week 13 - Thursday, 10 November 1994
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I will tell you what: I will do you a deal, Mr Moore. I will bring back this Bill in two weeks' time, when we next sit, with Mr Evans's amendments incorporated in it, if you and Ms Szuty promise to support it.
Mr Moore: No.
MR HUMPHRIES: No; of course not. There is the excuse out the window. When the CIR Bills were referred to the committee, Madam Speaker, I said that there was not enough time. We all said that there was not enough time to do this job. I find it extraordinary that, when the report arrives, in the preface we see this phrase from Mr Moore, the chairman of the committee:
The Committee feels that the six weeks allocated to it to inquire into CIR is inadequate to explore in depth all the issues ...
What a surprise! That was exactly what was said before the matter was referred.
Beyond that, Madam Speaker, not one of the important issues which were raised in the evidence before the committee about CIR and how it would operate - things like thresholds and the extent to which people should be able to put a scope of issues before the Assembly; a whole series of issues - was actually decided upon by the committee. Every one of these issues was too hard. Six weeks' worth of work did not actually produce a conclusion beyond, "We need to look at this again". If we are being paid by the hour, the public certainly is not getting much value for money, because we did not actually reach any conclusions. I withdraw that. There was one conclusion, and that was that your suggestion, Madam Speaker, that amendments to standing orders 170 and 174 should be further examined. The public did not get much value for money out of that proposal, I have to say to you. Being very keen to return to the question of the committee process in this place, I must say that this week, with the whistleblower legislation and now with the CIR legislation, we are seeing the use of committees by the Assembly not as instruments of enlightenment but as tools of delay and obfuscation. Nowhere has that been clearer than with this report this week.
Most of the committee's report, which is before us today, could have been written even before this Assembly committee heard any evidence. Perhaps it was, for all I know; because much of the report consists of extracts from critics of CIR in other literature which was never actually presented to the committee.
Mr Stevenson: Small detail; do not worry about that.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is a small detail, indeed; but from all sorts of people, most of them I had never heard of before, who argue that there are problems with CIR. Many of the more authoritative sources such as Professor de Quincey Walker, the dean of the faculty of law at the University of Queensland, did not have any of their work before the committee. Apparently the author, or authors, of the committee report did not bother to read that tome before they came to this place.
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