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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 3 Hansard (24 March) . . Page.. 733 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

interest in such things. I believe they do, and it is our responsibility to balance community interest on the one hand and commercial interest on the other. Somehow or other we have to reach a methodology for doing that.

Mr Humphries said that in many other places in the Act Ministers make decisions without review. He is correct in saying that, but he is not correct in saying that those decisions are not subject to review. He referred specifically to the casino licensing fee determined under section 15(1) and he talked about the commission-based player tax under section 16A(1). Those matters are in fact budget matters, and the Attorney would be the first one to complain if we said that fixing of a fee which comes before the Assembly as part of a budget is something that we should be able to disallow. He would protest as loudly as he could if it were suggested that putting those sorts of money matters up for disallowance should be the acceptable practice. The acceptable practice that is in place already is that they are money matters; that they are decisions that affect the revenue of the Territory; that they do come before the Assembly in the budget; and that they are shredded out through the Estimates Committee processes and the like. They are not decisions that are made by a Minister without any scrutiny at all.

Section 21 deals with 14 points where, the Minister having made a decision, copies of that decision must be laid before the Assembly. Such decisions cover a very wide range of matters indeed. Some of them are quite specific, but some of them are very wide. I would submit almost all, if not all, of the decisions that the Minister can make under the present Act are subject to review. The only one that is not subject to review, the only significant one, is the one that allows the Minister to make a decision about excising floor space from the casino for some other purpose. I submit that the Minister's argument was a bit tenuous when he said that there are all these other things that are not subject to review. In fact, they are in one way or another.

In conclusion, I want to make the point strongly that this Bill does not have the effect asserted by the Government. It in no way inhibits the process which the club and others have been going through. It just submits one element of that process to review by this place. I would argue that that is a legitimate responsibility of this place. The arguments against it that have been put to me by the Chief Minister, the Attorney-General and others seem to me to rest on the odd base that the Chief Minister would exercise her powers under the present Act where the case does not stand on its merits.

If the Chief Minister or any other Minister is not going to act on the basis that the proposal stands on its merits, why then would it be assumed that this place will not subject it to the same test? If the Chief Minister makes a decision on this matter, it comes before this Assembly, and if the proposition stands on its merits why would anybody in this place disallow it? It seems to be a very strange argument that we should not do this. The proposition seems to be that we might be able to slip it through the Chief Minister and she might sign it into place, but we do not want it reviewed. In other words, there is an implication that somehow the case would not stand on its merits and would not stand up under the scrutiny of this place. If that is the case, it almost strengthens my position that such decisions do need to be reviewed by this place.

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