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Government’s Legislative Program : Night Sittings

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (5.15), in reply: Mr Speaker, to close the - - -

MR SPEAKER: You will be closing the debate.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, I am aware of that. I will close the debate if no-one else wishes to speak. There are just two matters. One is that it has been drawn to my attention that in the Government's legislative program, under the heading “Environment, Land and Planning”, first priority legislation, the details appear to explain an amendment to the Ozone Protection Act 1991. Much as I would like to create a growth industry for the ACT in collecting certain things that everyone else is getting rid of, I have to say that when the description says that the Government will be phasing in chlorofluorocarbons and bromofluorocarbons in accordance with the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council Revised Strategy for Ozone Protection in Australia, it really meant, of course, that it will be phasing them out.

Mr Berry: I started to write a press release about it yesterday. But I thought that nobody would believe this; so what was the point?

MR HUMPHRIES: I am sorry, Mr Speaker, but I do not believe that Mr Berry would pass up an opportunity to have a go at us. I do not believe a word of that.

I also took the liberty of addressing this question of what city councils do by way of sitting on in the evenings. I checked it out. I checked with the Brisbane City Council. I thought that it was a likely model for the ACT, given its size. The Brisbane City Council apparently does have provisions for Tuesday night sittings. However, it appears that it has been a very long time since it actually sat on a Tuesday night. Apparently, there was a lack of interest on the part of the Brisbane City Council in doing that. They sit at 2.00 pm on Tuesdays and finish between 5 and 6 o'clock in the afternoon. For the whole of this year, for example, no sittings have gone beyond 5 or 6 o'clock in the afternoon. It appears that not everybody is as enlightened as the Opposition here about how valuable it is to sit on Tuesday evenings, particularly as far as city councils are concerned!

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Assembly adjourned at 5.17 pm until Tuesday, 9 May 1995, at 10.30 am

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