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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (2 March) . . Page.. 498 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
with the committee. I am not sure that they can do that. I am also not sure that it is useful for our system of governance to be blurring the lines further through these sorts of initiatives.
Mr Kaine: I agree with that.
MS TUCKER: Mr Kaine nods that he agrees with that. This Government is moving towards blurring the lines in a number of ways in this Assembly and I think we have to be very aware of that. That is another reason why I think the select committee amendment is worth supporting, because you can have a really clear situation there. If you want more resources you ask for it through the Assembly processes that we normally ask for in the secretariat. We all agree that this is an important issue that needs to be seen as a priority.
Of course, there is the other issue of resources in terms of the availability of only one Liberal backbencher, Mr Hird. There is nothing we can do about that at this point. Obviously we can have a debate about 21 members on another occasion, but that is one of the reasons why I have raised the need for that.
Now, I was Gary-ed. I do need to respond to being Gary-ed. Mr Humphries was concerned because I had said unkind things about the Government in my speech. I had said that they had not wanted a committee and that they were only going to give us two weeks. I was speaking about the relativity of the time it took to put this package together. I said it is interesting to note that the Treasurer, in the presentation speech for the Bill, said that officials have worked for 18 months on developing this package. It should therefore be quite reasonable for the Government to expect this Assembly to take a bit of time to review this legislation rather than voting on it after only a few weeks. I was not saying two weeks. There is often a period of a week. Okay, maybe it could be more. When we are asked to vote on Bills once they are tabled, sometimes it is only one or two weeks. Sometimes it is only one week. All I was saying there was relative to the 18 months that was spent preparing it. We would like a reasonable time to look at it through the committee process. I was not saying in any way that the Government was insisting on anything in that way. I will close on that.
MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (11.50): Mr Speaker, I have circulated an amendment to Ms Tucker's motion which I will move in order to insert a reporting date in the event that Mr Corbell's amendment to Ms Tucker's motion fails. It had been the Government's intention that the question of a reporting date should be left open. This is going to be quite a large exercise and I do not think it is appropriate to tell the committee that we expect that it could do all the work competently within the space of four months. In fact, more like three months actually - March, April, May, so it is three months.
Ms Tucker: We have the budget in there. August would be better.
MR HUMPHRIES
: And there is the budget as well, yes. So I did not think that three months is necessarily going to be enough time to do this. I also do not want to be open to the criticism that we are trying to put this on the backburner, as Mr Kaine suggested. So I am quite happy to move an amendment to give it a hearing date. I also indicate that
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