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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1857 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: No, not by a legal opinion of some QCs but by a decision of the High Court of Australia in December 1993. What does illegal mean in that sense? Does it mean that at the point of the decision they decide that from then on there will be no more collection of the tax? That is not what they said. It was illegal ab initio. It was unconstitutional from the beginning. Every dollar collected under that tax would have been illegally collected.

The public servants under the Minister were collecting that tax. The Minister was presiding over a regime where that tax was being collected. Did the Minister come to this place and resign? It was Ms Follett at the time. The answer is no, she did not. In fact, not only did the Minister of the time not resign; she came back to this place and asked the Assembly to legislate to allow the Government to keep the money which had been illegally collected, according to the High Court, for the preceding three years. She asked for that authority retrospectively. I might say, Mr Speaker, that she got it, with the support of those on the Liberal side of the chamber. We have consistently adopted the standard that the illegal acts of people in those circumstances where they are inadvertent should not have any consequence of the kind which is now being put forward by those opposite. Now we hear that when you do those sorts of things you have to resign. I hear those opposite muttering in very low voices, not wishing to be on the record perhaps, that there is some distinction between these circumstances and the circumstances presently. I look forward to hearing the difference, to hearing why those circumstances are different.

Another example was the much broader decision which the Capital Duplicators case ultimately led to in Ha and Lim, where the High Court struck down the entire collection of petrol, tobacco and liquor franchise fees. Whereas in Capital Duplicators tens of millions of dollars of revenue had been invalidated, in this case hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue was invalidated. Again the parliament was asked to validate that decision retrospectively. Those opposite - I am trying to anticipate what reason they will give for the distinction between these situations - might say, "That was not really a case in point either because, let us face it, the parliament was involved in that exercise and parliament agreed to that, so all the parliament was at fault, not just the particular public servants and particular Minister responsible at that time". Okay. Let us go to another example. I have plenty of examples to distinguish all these cases from the present one.

In May 1992, under a Labor government, there was a payment to the New South Wales Office of Racing of almost $15,000, $14,499, for its share in a study that was being set up apparently between the ACT and New South Wales. That payment was made out of the Racecourse Development Fund. That payment was illegal.

MR HUMPHRIES: At the point of being interrupted by dinner I was making an observation about payments from the Racecourse Development Fund in 1992. In August 1991, a legal opinion was obtained by the Office of Sport and Recreation which confirmed that administrative costs could not be paid from the Racecourse Development Fund. In May 1992, notwithstanding that earlier advice, a payment of $40,500 was made by the Office of Sport and Recreation to the New South Wales Office of Racing. That payment was caught by the advice that had been given the previous year and was clearly

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