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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (22 May) . . Page.. 1627 ..

MR DE (continuing):

have advised the Government of what your intention was; we might even have agreed with you. I have not yet spoken to my party about what they intend to do with this motion, Ms Tucker. I am not in a position to make decisions on behalf of everyone in the Liberal Party, believe it or not. You have a phone box of members over there on your side. You might be able to do whatever you like, but perhaps out of common courtesy you could have told us that you intended to do this.

We need to pass this Bill, Ms Tucker, or miss out on a lot of money from the Federal Government regarding competition policy. Your committee was aware of that and, quite rightly, that committee, of which you were part, said that you wanted to pass this Bill.

Mr Moore: There is the rest of the day, and we have tomorrow.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr De Domenico has the floor.

MR DE DOMENICO: I suggest that we go ahead and pass this Bill, and then consider talking about whatever you want to talk about at a later date, when we have had prior notice so that we know how to respond to your motion.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (3.47): Mr Speaker, I have some sympathy with the view put by Mr De Domenico about prior consultation on these sorts of things. I know that Mr Moore has not a long suit in prior consultation just at the moment. Our party room this morning a discussed proposal, which we understood was a proposal for an amendment to the Bill, and we are now faced with a piece of private members business that is different from what we discussed. We are sympathetic to the proposition the Greens are putting and we are happy to consider it favourably in due course, but we are not terribly enamoured of bringing it on now. It certainly was not a proposition that was put to us. We would like to discuss this at a later stage, in the appropriate timeslot in the Assembly, and we can negotiate about what the appropriate timeslot is.

As an aside, Mr Speaker, I suggest that it might be more appropriate to pass the legislation before we set up a forum to scrutinise it. We will certainly be interested to look at the Greens' proposal. As I said, discussions in our party room were sympathetic to this forum. We certainly supported the recommendation of the committee, and we hope that the Government will think again about adopting it, but on another occasion.

Question resolved in the negative.

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