Page 4652 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 7 December 1994
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Amendments have been suggested by the Chief Minister's officers. Those suggestions have been taken on board, and the amendments are now being drafted. There will be an opportunity to look at these matters before we come back this afternoon to debate them. I am sure that the Government finds it very convenient to say, "This is too hard; let us leave it to another day". If you felt that way, it would have helped to have had the necessary legislation in place, on the table and passed into law a long time before two weeks ago.
MR LAMONT (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Housing and Community Services, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport), by leave: Madam Speaker, the issue raised by Mr Humphries is somewhat of a fallacy. The questions that Mr Humphries has alleged that he wished to have addressed have been capable of being debated, discussed or tabled in this Assembly since the original legislation that he spoke about was tabled in September. He has failed to do so. A committee of this Assembly has spent at least a year - I would suggest, almost two years - considering the effects of a similar piece of legislation which was dealt with in the way that Mr Humphries is proposing that we now deal with this Bill. I refer specifically to the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee's investigations into the legislation underpinning the Territory Plan. You may recall, because you were in the First Assembly, Mr Humphries, the great concerns that were expressed by all parties at that time about the way in which that legislation and the amendments, in particular, were rushed through. In hindsight, they were ill considered, ill conceived and - - -
Mr Moore: That is just not how it happened.
MR LAMONT: It did. The number of amendments proposed, debated and discussed without their being analysed properly as to what their effect would be, I would suggest to you, caused the most substantial of the planks for reconsideration of that legislation by the PDI Committee, Mr Moore.
Mr Moore: But they were not rushed; that is what I am saying.
MR LAMONT: But they were rushed. The majority of them were determined on the floor of the Assembly as the debate continued. That will be the way in which any variations, alterations or additions to the proposals put forward by Mr Humphries on this matter will need to be considered by this Assembly. We have two sitting days left in the life of this Assembly and - - -
Mr Kaine: And you are going to use up all today with this stupid debate.
Mr Humphries: Yes, that is right; that is what will happen.
MR LAMONT: Did you get a prescription or something overnight? The simple fact is that, in considering a matter of this substance - and it is an extremely complex, substantial matter - - -
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