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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 563 ..

MR STEFANIAK: I am not aware of that, Mr Osborne. I am certainly happy to make some inquiries about that. Those are the figures I have been given. I am not aware of the circumstances. There might, in fact, be other reasons you are not aware of as to why that occurs, but if there are any glitches in the system I would certainly be happy to find out about them.

Mr Osborne: What about Mr De Domenico? Just say one good line about him, please.

MR STEFANIAK: I have been ruled out of order, but I am sure we will get a chance to talk about him soon.

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Chief Minister, and it is not about her last opportunity to bid farewell to the previous Deputy Chief Minister. It is about the cost of the two legal opinions obtained this morning at the instruction of Mr Walker, the chief executive of your department - also known as the vice-president - regarding the Holidays (Amendment) Bill which went through the Assembly this morning. Would you tell us the cost of those legal opinions?

MRS CARNELL: I do not think we have actually received the bills yet, Mr Moore. We got the opinions at only 10 past 6 last night. Some legal firms are very efficient billers, but that would be an extremely efficient biller. There were two legal opinions. One was from the Government Solicitor and one was from the private sector. Mr Moore, I think it is important to know that we get legal opinions on almost all of the Bills if there is any chance that they may be at odds with other laws that exist. It would be normal for the ACT Government to get legal opinions on all sorts of things that are likely to place us in a position of ending up in the Supreme Court.

The reality was that our internal solicitor, whom we obviously asked for an opinion on the legality of the Bill, suggested that there was potential for very real problems, at which stage we thought, "Oh, dear! We are likely to end up in the Supreme Court here. We had better get a legal opinion from an expert in this particular area". We did. One of the partners of the firm that we chose is Stephen Loosley - a well-known Liberal! Mr Speaker, I believe very strongly that, if the ACT Government had not got legal opinions on something that our internal opinion said was likely to be a problem, we would simply not have been doing our job.

MR MOORE: I ask a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. If you believe that it is so critical to have legal opinions on such things and to get them from private firms so that you can be doing your job, Chief Minister, I presume you will then be making funds available to crossbench members and the Opposition so that every time you put up legislation they - and that includes me - can give instructions the way they want to give instructions about the sort of legal opinion that they want as well. That would be a reasonable way to ensure that we had appropriate legislation, would it not?

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