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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1565 ..

MR HIRD (continuing):

last year whereby the committee reports to the territory's parliament on its activities in each year. Committee members hope that the report will interest their colleagues in the Assembly as well as members of the public.

The committee has met on 103 occasions since it was established on 28 April 1998. In its first year, April 1998 to April 1999, it met on 46 occasions and in its second year, to May of this year, it met on 57 occasions. Forty-five of those 57 meetings have involved a private meeting and 31 have involved a public hearing. Obviously, many meetings involved both public and private considerations. The total time taken for public hearings was 921/2 hours.

In each of its first and second years of operation, the committee produced 24 reports. The reports ranged across subjects as varied as the placement of movable signs, draft variations to the Territory Plan, numbers of and conditions applying to the use of taxis for the disabled, long service leave provisions for the cleaning industry, betterment charges, tree management policies, and traffic calming measures.

Half of all the reports involved draft variations to the Territory Plan. The next largest number of reports dealt with transport issues. The committee twice examined the activities of the Department of Urban Services, once when looking at the department's 1998-99 annual report and once when scrutinising the department's 2000-01 draft budget. The longest committee inquiry took 19 months. However, a majority of the inquiries lasted three months or less.

Over 200 witnesses addressed the committee at these hearings and 244 submissions were received. The greatest number of submissions related to the committee's inquiry into draft variation No 94 for the Federal Golf Course, for which there were 121 submissions, followed by the 30 submissions for the inquiry into a tree protection policy, 21 submissions for the inquiry into a traffic warrant system for traffic calming devices, and 15 submissions for the inquiry into taxi services for disabled persons. The current inquiry into the Gungahlin Drive extension has already been the subject of 821 submissions.

All but four of the committee's 24 reports arose out of a specific resolution of the territory's parliament or by legislation. Those arising out of legislation derived from the specific provisions of the Land (Planning and Environment) Act 1991 that refer draft plan variations and draft plans of management for public land to the appropriate committee of the Assembly. The four reports that did not originate in a resolution of this place or by legislation had their origin in the power of the Assembly standing committees to self-refer matters for examination. The committee did so in the case of inquiries into car parking at EPIC, a trees policy, warrants for traffic calming measures and reporting on the national conference of parliamentary public works and environment committees.

The committee is aware of the difficulty in measuring the efficiency of parliamentary committees. With this qualification, the committee pointed out to its Assembly colleagues that it has produced 48 reports to date. On 9 May this year we tabled four reports, which is understood to be the most number of reports tabled by any committee in one sitting day. We have produced, on average, two reports for each month of our existence.

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