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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 923 ..

MR ACTING SPEAKER: Order! Members who rise to a point of order on interjections should recall that.

MR BERRY: Finally, I mention the social and community service - SACS - award. Mr Hird said:

Again the majority of the Committee has presented a recommendation which appears to ignore a select part of the advice presented to it. The situation is clear: the award does not have compulsory application in the ACT, and it is therefore not possible to undertake an analysis of its effect.

Mr Hird, are you telling me that the SACS award has no application in the ACT? Did you not know that awards of the Industrial Relations Commission do have compulsory application in the ACT in the workplaces which are covered by those awards? I think that you have misjudged the situation in relation to that matter.

I put it to the Assembly that this dissenting report should be ignored. It is a dissenting report which does no credit to the Government and I would urge the Government to instruct its members to give more attention to their duties on committees, otherwise we will have a situation each time where members will be able to sit through the process and look as if they agree with everything that happens and then at the end of it go through this charade of producing a dissenting report, not having made a contribution initially. Why bother coming along at all? It might be better if you went off and turned your mind to other committee duties around the place. I know that you are busy, but I think that is a poor reflection on the way that committees operate and it does not assist us if we are not able to debate the issues. I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR HIRD (11.12): It is interesting, Mr Acting Speaker, that I sit on five standing committees and only one of them gives me a problem, that is, the one on which I am about to talk. Mr Berry's attitude is that it is not good enough if you do not agree with him and he subjects you to a barrage of personal attacks. It just so happens that sometimes I do agree with Mr Berry. For example, he referred to a matter on which he was woefully wrong and corrected the situation. I congratulated him on that.

Let me say, Mr Acting Speaker, that after careful thought I have come to the conclusion that the parliament should not accept this report. The report makes a number of recommendations and draws a number of conclusions, based on evidence which was put before the committee. However, the accuracy of much of the evidence is largely untested. The Minister responsible for the preparation of the draft budget, and it is the Minister's draft budget, was not given the opportunity to respond. Both of the earlier speakers said that my committee - the Planning and Urban Services Committee - did not follow that procedure. We did not need to. It was not felt that we should bring back the Minister for Urban Services because there was no need to. We discussed this matter in committee and it was agreed that we would not bring him back. That was the committee's choice, not the Minister's choice. If the Minister had wanted to come back to the Planning and Urban Services Committee, we would have given him some encouragement to come back.

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