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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4762 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

This provision provides that existing operators will have to go through a process of renewing those certificates every two years. I fail to see any particular reason why an existing operator, having satisfied the registrar that they were an operator prior to the commencement of the legislation, should have to go through the process of satisfying the registrar every two years. I think there are other ways for the registrar to keep track of heavy vehicles. I suggest that it would take some of the bureaucracy out of the legislation if we did away with the need to renew the certificates every two years.

MR DE DOMENICO (Minister for Urban Services) (6.54): The Government will be supporting the amendment, Mr Speaker. It is a very reasonable one and we are happy to support it.

Amendment agreed to.

MS HORODNY (6.54): I ask for leave to move amendment No. 10 circulated in my name.

Leave granted.

MS HORODNY: I move:

Page 9, line 36, after proposed subsection 150U(7) add the following subsection:

"(8) The Registrar shall not grant an exemption from those provisions of the Code of Practice that relate specifically to existing operators.".

Under the Bill, the code of practice will contain separate rules for existing operators; but existing operators can seek exemptions even from these already watered-down rules, under the new section 150T. This amendment ensures that the rules for existing operators in the code of practice will clearly set the bottom line for truck operators that cannot be slipped around. However, what these rules should be will no doubt be a matter of further debate once the code of practice is tabled in the Assembly.

MR BERRY (6.55): Mr Speaker, I thought I would express a bit of indignation about some of the extreme positions that have been taken. There is a sea change going on in relation to operators of trucks in the ACT which will change the lives of many of them, for some of them permanently. Some of them will be forced out of the industry and into other forms of work. Those are the facts of life. There are people out there whose businesses are on a knife edge. People who have had parking available to them in their place of residence at no cost will now be forced to pay for it somewhere else, or to park their trucks elsewhere, buy extra vehicles, and so on. Mr Whitecross said that if you were going to start out with a blank sheet of paper you would do it differently. We all would.

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