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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (22 February) . . Page.. 224 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

This is an opportunity for us to remove some of these bits of legislation that are redundant and in fact pose questions about the way we should operate in law anyway. I think it is an appropriate step forward, and I take delight in supporting the legislation.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (4.56): I thank members for their support for the Bill. Obviously, legislation such as this does take time. I do not think it takes quite seven years, as suggested by the Leader of the Opposition. This may have been a process begun by Labor in 1989, but it took a hell of a long time to get to doing much about it. Most of the Bills repealed in the previous parliaments have been Bills - - -

Ms Follett: We have done it twice already. It is a continuing process. This will not be the last time you do it, either.

MR HUMPHRIES: If you just listen, Ms Follett, you will hear what is going on. Just listen very calmly and you will hear what is going on.

Ms Follett: Stop misrepresenting me.

MR HUMPHRIES: I am not misrepresenting. I am saying that the process that goes on is a continuing one. The sorts of Acts we are talking about here are generally very old Acts that generally in the past have not been part of the process of reviewing legislation. One might say that they do not necessarily, therefore, take up a lot of room, a lot of attention, on the statute books in a legal sense; but with a process of updating the laws of the Territory, and particularly making those laws available in electronic database form - there are a number of quite exciting proposals in that process that are coming forward and that I hope to tell the Assembly about quite soon - there is a need for us to be able to summarise succinctly what the law is on a particular subject. If the database is asked to call up, for example, laws relating to eggs and the egg industry or police offences or laws relating to estates in land or whatever it might be, at the present time the sorts of laws we are repealing today would need to have been called up on the database to give a complete picture of what the law is like in the Territory. Naturally, we do not want that to be the case, because these laws are effectively obsolete or the principles they were enacted under have been superseded by other more contemporary principles and they need to be replaced by other legislation.

I thank members for their support for this Bill. To comment on the point made by Ms Follett about lack of Government business, first of all, there are 30 items on the Executive business program under orders of the day. I think there is plenty to get through, and I am quite looking forward to being able to do that. Let me say something else about that. If we end up with very little legislation brought forward over a period of time, except perhaps for Bills to repeal Acts, I for one will be very happy with that state of affairs. You should not measure the effectiveness of a government or a parliament by the number of pieces of legislation that are churned through the Assembly. Laws impose on somebody somewhere a burden of some kind, as well as, hopefully, assisting people,

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