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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (6 September) . . Page.. 2940 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
For a start, we know that the recommendations of an Assembly committee were not even supported by Mr Osborne, the chair of that committee. We know that the recommendations were not followed. In fact, we saw the government response to the report only two weeks before we had this debate. I would not say that that was a particularly long time. But we have lived with sort of thing before in certain circumstances, so it is not so unusual even though it is not satisfactory.
The issue of Mr Rugendyke's amendments has to be acknowledged as important and I am very surprised Mr Humphries did not do that. As other speakers have highlighted, Mr Rugendyke's amendments clearly and significantly change the focus of the government's intention, creating a piece of legislation which, as we have already heard from other members, is discriminatory and unjust in its nature. Mr Humphries has put it on the record in a letter to me that he did not have time to look at those amendments. So it is quite strange that he is now saying that every issue was fully canvassed and that we should therefore be satisfied with the legislation that this Assembly passed last year, and that I am a sore loser because I have brought it up again.
The truth of the matter is that it was not fully canvassed. The government might have known about Mr Rugendyke's amendments but the Greens certainly did not have time to look at them. They were given to us at very short notice but we could see immediately that there were huge issues with them. I wrote to Mr Humphries inquiring about his position. I pointed out that he had made statements after the debate-they were not made during the debate-to justify his position. He said that this was positive discrimination which is totally appropriate under discrimination law. I asked Mr Humphries for a fuller explanation of his arguments and in his response he said:
You ask for details of the disadvantage suffered by members of the police force, the fire brigade etc as justification for the amendments moved to the ACT in December. With respect, you should understand that the Government was confronted with these amendments some short while before the Victims of Crime Bill was considered by the Assembly. The Government did not have the opportunity to explore the issues you now raise before the bill came on for a vote. Perhaps the basis for the amendments is best taken up with the person who moved them, Mr Rugendyke.
I'm sure you also understand that the Government's position was dictated by the fact that only Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne were willing to address the issue of the burgeoning cost of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme and, as such, the issues they raised carried greater weight than those (rather unhelpful) positions put in the debate by others. With respect, the situation in this Bill is not dissimilar to that confronting the Government in the recent budget debate. It ill behoves other MLAs to take an inflexible position ("We reject your Victims Bill) or ("We reject your budget") and then complain when the compromises the Government is forced to make don't suit those members.
So basically what Mr Humphries has acknowledged or claimed in that letter is that he did not have time to really think it through.
The arguments that were put in respect of positive discrimination are interesting. In my letter to Mr Humphries, which resulted in the response that I have just read, I asked particular questions because I was interested in the argument that it was positive discrimination. As members are no doubt well aware, positive discrimination relates to disadvantage experienced by these groups in comparison to the rest of the community
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