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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 530 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Anybody who has anything to do with lawyers knows that, when you go to a lawyer, you say, "Can I have a legal opinion to tell me so and so?". The lawyers say, "Sure, we can find arguments for that". That is what they are doing; they are providing arguments for that. When you keep that in context and look at these legal opinions - I must thank the Government for providing them for me this morning, which I thought was very fair minded - you see they are absolutely full of caveats. The caveats are all about making sure that it is not an absolute. These are legal opinions.

Let me give an example from the Government Solicitor. On the second page of his advice, he says, "Two laws may be directly inconsistent". Yes, they may be; any two laws may be inconsistent. We know that lawyers are very careful with the way they use the words "may", "shall" and "will"; they are very careful how they use those words. More importantly, towards the bottom of that second page, he says:

I have not had available to me at the time of preparing this advice copies of the relevant awards and have not therefore undertaken such an examination.

He goes on, on the third page, to say, "It is arguable that the reference to". On the fourth page, the second paragraph starts:

It is doubtful, however, that section 5 of the Bill has the effect referred to in the preceding paragraph.

At the end of that same paragraph, he says:

There is a prospect that expectations created by the Bill will not be realised and that legal confusion will result.

He is not even saying that it is likely that this is legal or illegal or that it is his opinion that it is illegal; he is saying that legal confusion will result. Then, in conclusion, he says:

I have not been provided with any explanatory material in relation to the Bill. To the extent, however ...

It is just so full of caveats that it does not warrant being held up as something. There is some interesting material in there. Mr Kaine has been through that, and there is a possibility.

Then we go to the private sector legal opinion that we have also been provided with. The caveats in this one begin quite early, in the fourth dot point of the first paragraph, which states:

We have not had the opportunity to review the provisions of all of the awards referred to in the Schedule, however, we will assume that ...

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