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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 9 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2639 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Another impact of this proposal would be on the time available for members and the community to consider subordinate laws. This time would be severely reduced and may be insufficient to organise meetings and for consultation on the issues raised by the subordinate law. There is, of course, a process which does allow for the lodgment of protective notices of motion for disallowance, and that could, in those circumstances, lead to that.

There is one other impact that one can mention and that is on the precedence of business in the Assembly. Notices of motion to disallow subordinate laws are Assembly business, which has precedence over all other business on Thursday mornings. The way in which Assembly business is ordered means that, if a notice to disallow or amend a subordinate law is lodged on a Wednesday, it may not be dealt with the following day. It will be held over until the following week, unless we suspend standing orders, of course, and the Assembly will be under a deadline to deal with the matter that week, as the final day for consideration of the law would be the Wednesday of the next sitting week. This could work to the Government's disadvantage in that, if the notice was not dealt with and standing orders not suspended, the subordinate law would be deemed to have been disallowed or amended.

Having regard to this background, the Labor Party did give some consideration to whether there were some alternative processes for achieving a similar purpose. The aim of greater certainty for people affected by the legislation could certainly be achieved by other means. For example, subordinate laws may be classified according to the degree of urgency or whether extensive consultation had taken place prior to making the law. In these cases, shorter periods could apply. Achieving the aim through these means would require more extensive amendments than are proposed. The Labor Party, I hasten to add, is not proposing any such amendments either.

It seems to us that it would be simpler to amend subsection 6(1)(c) of the Act which provides that subordinate laws must be tabled within 15 sitting days after gazettal. There appears to be no good reason for not reducing this time to, say, six days and to thus cut three sitting weeks off the time allowed. Only the Commonwealth allows 15 sitting days for lodgment of subordinate laws. Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia allow six days. The Northern Territory allows only three days. The others allow 14 days for that action. Reducing the time allowed for tabling rather than disallowance permits greater scrutiny of subordinate laws and still achieves the aim of giving people affected by the subordinate law greater certainty sooner.

To take the particular option proposed by the Attorney here, the shortest time set for disallowance in any other jurisdiction in Australia is in the Northern Territory where it is 12 sitting days. So it is worth noting that the Attorney's proposal would create a situation in which we in the ACT would halve that particular current shortest time for disallowance to six days. That is something worth pondering on. Having said that, I hasten to add - and we confronted this problem in giving our consideration to this piece of legislation - that there really is no objective test for deciding or selecting the

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