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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1057 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, the meeting was keen to look at our Interstate Agreements Act, which I had provided to the conference earlier in the piece - in about June 1999. The meeting informally congratulated the ACT on being proactive in scrutinising potential agreements between the States. I indicated that, as an individual member, I had received some advice from Ministers on potential agreements in such meetings as ministerial councils. Mr Speaker, what I did not tell the meeting was that, contrary to the Interstate Agreements Act, the ACT Government has not complied with the requirement for prior consultation with the Assembly scrutiny of Bills committee.

I would urge the Government to comply with these provisions. What in a sense this means is that, when individual members receive advice from a Minister that they intend to undertake an interstate agreement, that advice is also forwarded to the scrutiny of Bills committee or to the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety acting in that role. Then the Act will be totally complied with and we can get on with it.

The meeting was most productive. There is goodwill amongst the delegates to move towards appropriate consultation and scrutiny of national scheme legislation and possibly the scrutiny of treaties at a later date. Mr Speaker, I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR OSBORNE: I present the following report:

I ask for leave to make a brief statement on the report.

Leave granted.

MR OSBORNE: Scrutiny Report No. 5 of 2000 contains the committee's comments on four Bills, 24 subordinate laws and four government responses. I commend the report to the Assembly.

Just briefly, Mr Speaker, the report is quite a detailed one. There are some pieces of legislation within that report which I think the Government does need to look quite closely at. One in particular - the Cooperatives Bill - does have some quite significant problems. There appear to be some major problems with the Bill, so I would encourage the Minister - I am not quite sure which Minister tabled it; I think it may have been Mr Humphries - to have a look at that.

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