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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3274 ..

MR MOORE (11.06): Mr Speaker, a very interesting precedent would be set by this motion enabling the committee to report at any time it likes. I will be supporting the motion. But I think we are saying to committees that it is not their prime role to report to the Assembly; that they may report to the community and then report to the Assembly. There is a slight variation in the way things are done. With this precedent, this can happen all the time, whereas in the past specific committees have had the permission of the Assembly to report out of session. In the end, I think it would be much more convenient and would allow us to get more work done if we allowed committees to report out of session, with the Speaker's approval. I think it is worth thinking about whether in the next Assembly we should change our standing orders to allow this method to apply to all committees or whether it should be contained to the last six months or so of the Assembly to allow reporting that would otherwise be difficult.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.08): Mr Speaker, I must admit that I had assumed that the motion Mr Whitecross was moving to bring forward a reporting date was, in effect, a response to some earlier timetable that had been set but could not be met and so was being modified to achieve the original intention of the Assembly. I am grateful to Mr Moore for drawing to my attention what has been proposed, which is, in effect, that the report be available to the general community before it is presented to the Assembly. I must say that I express a little bit of concern about that process. It is, of course, the Assembly which sets up the committees in the first place, which generally commissions the reports that the committees work on and which is to receive the reports at the appropriate time. I do not intend to oppose the motion, but I am indicating that I think that this should not be seen as a precedent for committees generally to report whenever they wish, rather than to report to the Assembly. Mr Speaker, I just want to put those comments on the record in speaking to this motion.

MR WHITECROSS (11.09), in reply: Mr Speaker, I take on board the comments made by Mr Moore and Mr Humphries, and I look forward to having some further discussions in or out of this place about the wider ramifications. I should say that most of the reports we are talking about are on Auditor-General's reports and come under our standing reference. We are not actually changing reporting dates per se. We are talking about how we deal with standing references. I think there are perhaps one or two exceptions, but the vast majority are standing references.

In relation to the one inquiry for which we have been given a reporting date by the Assembly, I do not expect that the report will be completed before the proposed reporting date, which is 2 December - certainly not before 4 November, which is the date referred to in this motion. That is the business incentive scheme inquiry. I cannot see that this issue will arise with that report, but Public Accounts Committee reports on Auditor-General's reports are in a slightly different situation. It is not a dissimilar situation to the circumstances of reporting on variations to leases and some other things. I thank the Assembly for agreeing to support the motion. I am happy to discuss the principles behind it further with other members in due course.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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