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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (4 November) . . Page.. 3518 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

The committee is enthusiastic to ensure that its report is taken into account and it gives the Government the opportunity to come back to the Assembly to deal with the issues. The approach taken by the committee was not so much to examine the Bill clause by clause, although we did do that, but rather to consider particular issues of concern raised in submissions and at public hearings. I wish to stress that many of the report's 56 recommendations are interrelated and the committee sees them as a package. I do not think we need to go into what will happen if the Government is not prepared to accept the recommendations, Mr Speaker. I think we have made that clear.

I will run through a few of the conceptual notions of the recommendations. First, I refer to the presentation of the legislation. Recommendation 1 proposes that a cross-referencing system be adopted in the legislation to show readers where one clause relates to another. I think this is a great opportunity, leading into the Fourth Assembly, Mr Speaker, to say that there is a better way to do legislation. It has been highlighted for us. We picked up this approach in a recommendation from the Environmental Defender's Office which referred to the way it is done in some parts of Federal legislation. I think there is great benefit to be gained from looking at ways of dealing with this. We added as an appendix to the report a description of how one might cross-reference. We gave three examples of how it might be done, our preference being the third.

We thought it appropriate to refocus the objects of the legislation. Recommendation 2 seeks to refocus the objects of the Bill so that the principles on which the Bill is based take precedence over economic and practicality considerations. It seems to me that that reverses slightly the approach of the Government. The Government had implied that economic and practicality considerations would take priority. The committee wanted it to be very clear that the priority was the objects of the Bill, the principles of the Bill. Of course, that does not mean to say that you do not take into account economic and practicality considerations. Of course you do.

The timing of the commencement was another issue, Mr Speaker, in order to ensure that appropriate education is associated with this legislation. There was a long debate in the committee about the independence of the Environmental Management Authority. The committee has conditionally accepted - I think it is really important to understand that it is a conditional acceptance - the Government's proposal for the EMA to be a public servant holding statutory office provided that recommendation 5, which limits the power of the Minister to intervene, is accepted by the Government. Even so, Mr Speaker, all members will be monitoring this very carefully.

Ms Horodny certainly made a compromise. She expressed, very clearly, her view that this was not her perspective. Other members had a great deal of doubt about this but decided, on balance - it was only just on balance, I might add - that we would go with the Government on this issue. It is something that we - particularly Mr Corbell and I, when we are back here in the Fourth Assembly - will be monitoring very carefully. I do not include Ms Horodny because she has indicated that she is not standing; so that is not a put-down in that sense.

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