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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1706 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

I would say to the Government that, in looking at committee reports in the future, you do not really have to accept what your bureaucrats write for you. You can actually have your own opinions on it. I would suggest to you that on this occasion you ought to have done that, and not just signed off the empty rhetoric that was yet again put before you.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (4.16): Mr Speaker, it seems that we are allowed to disagree with our bureaucrats but not with Assembly committees. I think this motion, as amended, exhibits all the signs of something being formulated on the run. If members were to sit down carefully and quietly and think about it long and hard - - -

Ms Follett: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: The only amendment moved has been by Mr De Domenico, and that was definitely done on the run.

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order.

MR HUMPHRIES: No, it is not; it has been amended by Ms Tucker.

Ms Follett: She has not moved that.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, she has already asked to have it amended.

MR SPEAKER: There is an amendment put forward by Ms Tucker which has been incorporated into her original motion.

MR HUMPHRIES: Ms Follett can send her apology round in an envelope. That is fine. Mr Speaker, this motion really is, in my view, ill thought through. Look at the motion very carefully and you see a number of gaping holes in it.

Mr Moore: Then amend it and fill them.

MR HUMPHRIES: We have proposed to amend it. We propose to amend it to take it away from this structure altogether; that is our amendment. Let me make a few points. First of all, in the past this Assembly has had considerable difficulty with processes overviewing legislation we formulate or will formulate where those processes are outside the Assembly. One good example of that - a matter Mr Moore used to talk about in the previous Assembly - was the Community Law Reform Committee having references on issues that coincided with issues on the agenda of the Assembly and the difficulty of having matters referred outside the Assembly to those sorts of bodies.

Perhaps I am simple or something, but it seems to me that the primary body responsible for overviewing legislation of this Assembly is the Assembly itself and its component parts, including its committees. Its committees ought to have the primary role of determining what is going on with those pieces of legislation and make adjustments accordingly. If this monitoring committee, let us say, has an ongoing role in monitoring this legislation, presumably it therefore can make recommendations, prepare reports and so on, which will come back - we do not know where, because the motion does not say. We assume that it is reporting to the Minister, but we do not really know. It might be reporting to the Assembly or to an Assembly committee, I do not know - to you, Mr Speaker, perhaps; to my mother-in-law, who knows?

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