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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2200 ..

Mr Humphries: Where is the evidence of that, Michael?

MR MOORE: It is in the report, Mr Humphries. If you talked to individual members of that committee about places they went to and what they saw, then of course you would understand that. The committee, in writing their report, had to be reasonably discreet about how they described what they saw in other places, and appropriately so. To deal with what members of the committee have referred to in personal conversation as inappropriate conduct, they put into place a series of protections and said, "These are the protections we need".

It is just not good enough for the Government to say, "We are going to take all the good, but we are going to reject what the committee has recommended and we are going to put into place instead some other, lame methods". Of course, the other, lame methods are better than nothing, and I know that we are speaking about a trial; but we have just had another trial on 4.00 am closing and it is very interesting that Mr Humphries is very keen to say, "Who cares about the result of the trial? We still want to retain 4.00 am closing". Maybe Mr Humphries will think I am misrepresenting his position on that a little. Perhaps I am. I do not intend to, but that is the sense that I get.

To me, it is critical that these protections be in place first. The Legal Affairs Committee did what the committees do best. They came out with a very sensible compromise and a sensible way through a major difference of opinion within the Assembly, and we ought to respect that result. That is why I have moved this amendment, and that is why I seek support from other members of the Assembly.

MR WOOD (3.33): Mr Speaker, the Opposition will give support to this amendment. Mr Humphries has a habit of trashing reports. Later today we will be examining the action he proposes to take in trashing a report on 4.00 am closing. I wonder sometimes why, when reports are commissioned by the Government or commissioned by this Assembly, no notice is taken of them. I hope that Mr Kaine, now Mr Humphries's ministerial colleague, joins this debate, because the report, as Mr Moore says, is a consensus document agreed by Mr Kaine, Ms Follett and Mr Osborne. It proposes sensible measures that this Assembly ought to put in place before running a trial.

Of course, Mr Humphries, in playing around with words, tried to convince us that this is something extraordinarily complex, something that would take a great amount of work to do and something that therefore should not be used to delay unnecessarily what he would wish to see happen. I do not know why we would want to consider these to be complex matters. We consider all sorts of matters in this Assembly, and I would not think that getting privacy provisions in place is any more complex than anything else.

The basic fact is that we have an agreed report by three groups in this Assembly. There is no minority report in it; it is agreed. It sets down certain basic principles, and those are the principles that this Assembly ought to follow. I believe that it is not the appropriate course for the Minister now to come in and say, "Let us move ahead of that".

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