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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 577 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

everybody in this place at one stage or another. So when members of the Assembly recognise that problem and bring forward legislation in an attempt to fix it, I can only say that that is a worthwhile endeavour.

Being a member of the scrutiny of Bills committee which endorsed this report for tabling today, I have to say that this exercise demonstrates a very simple matter and it should be a lesson. When a major problem, a complex problem, like this arises, it cannot be rectified by a short 10-line amendment to an existing Act. When you read in detail the comment from the scrutiny of Bills committee you discover that there are some very substantial difficulties and problems behind this seemingly simple notion of amending an Act to eliminate the confidentiality that seems to go with much of what government does these days.

All I want to do, Mr Speaker, is draw to the attention of the authors of these two Bills the detailed comment report that is made in this report and to ask them, as a commonsense procedure, to go away and think carefully about their Bills, the implications of their Bills, and the shortcomings in their Bills, before they bring them forward for debate. If they come forward for debate now, with all of these questions raised by the scrutiny of Bills committee, there is going to be a shambles in this place and we will get nowhere.

I think, sensibly, that the Bills should be kept off the agenda until the authors, and the rest of us in this place who are going to have to debate the matter, have addressed the questions raised here. If that is done and the matter is held off for a week or two until we can be sure that we are on top of these issues, not only will we get an intelligent debate but hopefully we will get a good outcome. I am sure that neither of those things would occur if we were to try to hurry the debate and deal with it too quickly.

MS CARNELL (Chief Minister): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to make a brief comment.

Leave granted.

MS CARNELL: I reiterate many of the comments that Mr Kaine has just made. The fact is that we do have a number of Bills which attempt to do some similar things. The scrutiny of Bills committee has made it clear that this is a difficult area, and I would agree with it. It is about balancing the rights of various parts of our community. We should always be concerned about rights, whether it be the rights of the business community or the community more broadly.

I was fascinated by the comments by Mr Berry, and I will quote one of the comments that he made in the VITAB debate, or maybe more than one. He indicated a few minutes ago, Mr Speaker, that if the Assembly had moved to require him to table the documents he would have done so. However, on 1 March 1994 he said this:

He went on to say:

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