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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2800 ..
MR QUINLAN (6.20): I move amendment No 24:
No 24-
Page 6, line 26, add the following new subclauses:
"(3) ACTIA must, within 6 days of giving an indemnity to a third-party, give the Minister a copy of the indemnity.
(4) The Minister must present to the Legislative Assembly a copy of the indemnity within 6 sitting days of receiving it.
(5) If the first day on which the copy of the indemnity may be presented to the Legislative Assembly is more than 14 days after the day on which it was given to the Minister, the Minister must cause a copy of the indemnity to be made available to the members of the Legislative Assembly within those 14 days.".
This amendment requires the minister to advise the Assembly of indemnities given to third parties. This is a reasonably serious question. Given that we have a full suite of processes whereby government reports to the Assembly, particularly on potential and contingent commitments that it has made, I think it is appropriate that those indemnities should be advised to the Assembly.
MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (6.22): Mr Speaker, I have a grave problem with the principle of what Mr Quinlan is attempting to do. Accountability is not something which, as I said earlier today, we shy away from. But there are two problems with this. One is, I suppose, a tangential issue. What exactly are members going to do with the information? How will it help them to know that an indemnity has been given?
I point out that there are large numbers of cases at the moment of documents, which apparently are never sought and never read, being tabled in this place. Each sitting day, and certainly at the beginning of each sitting fortnight, I as Treasurer table a large wad of papers. Relatively few of those papers are ever sought by members of the Assembly. There is an administrative cost in producing those papers all the time, a cost which is now very considerable. Members drew attention to that in the last Estimates Committee hearings. Very little of the mountain of stuff which is tabled all the time is being sought by members. I wonder who is going to read the indemnities provided by the ACT Insurance Authority?
The second point is that there is a practical problem. I am advised that there are several hundred indemnities granted by the ACT in any given year. Indemnities are not only provided to people who are operating at venues where, for example, major sporting events such as the Olympic Games are taking place. Indemnities are provided in all sorts of circumstances. For example, when the Department of Urban Services asks for permission to set up a display in the Canberra Centre for National Road Safety Week, the Centre managers will generally say to us, "We will need to have an insurance cover for the eventuality that one of the displays might fall over and hit a shopper and injure them." We say, "We don't actually insure, we don't actually take out insurance policies. We are a self-insuring entity but we will provide an indemnity to you, Canberra Centre, in the event that that display topples over."
Given the number of activities the government is involved with across the territory, there are literally hundreds of indemnities given every year. I have to ask the Assembly: what value is there in tabling, as we would every day we come to this place, another wad of
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