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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3458 ..

MR MOORE (Minister for Health, Housing and Community Care) (9.10): I am pleased on behalf of the government to back my colleague Mr Smyth in supporting this legislation. I think Mr Hargreaves is adding to a series of amendments to legislation such as subordinate legislation which have made the government more open and more accountable. It started, I think, with the Subordinate Laws Act which, as I recall, was Mr Connolly's act. I moved amendments to that. His act related to disallowable instruments. I added to that to make sure that those disallowable instruments were able to be amended as well.

The Administration (Interstate Agreements) Act and a range of acts will make this parliament much more informed than other parliaments, and we have the ability to make sure that our laws are not undermined by the executive. We can watch very carefully how decisions are made.

Mr Hargreaves' legislation is another step in that direction, and I think that is very sensible. This government, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, has always been the most open government in Australia, so we are not only comfortable but also excited about the suggestions that Mr Hargreaves has made.

There are some issues in respect to the detail stage which we are looking at at the moment. We have agreed with Mr Hargreaves to support this bill in principle. We will look at the details. We will go to Mr Hargreaves if we have any issues about amendments early so that we have time to discuss those and make sure that we can adopt a sensible approach before coming back into the Assembly with them.

MS TUCKER (9.12): This bill requires the government to present regulatory impact statements when introducing subordinate legislation in cases where the subordinate legislation may impose significant costs on part or all of the community. I appreciate the effort of Mr Hargreaves to circulate a draft of this bill some time ago so that we would be aware of this proposal.

I understand from him that regulatory impact statements are already provided in a number of states to allow proper scrutiny of the effects of subordinate legislation. I understand that this bill is modelled on the Queensland legislation.

As members are aware, while bills are scrutinised in some detail by the Assembly because there needs to be a vote on them to get them implemented, subordinate legislation can often slip through unnoticed because they are only disallowable. Often the subordinate legislation is just provided to the Assembly as a list of documents, and members have to take the trouble to find these documents and read them before the disallowance period expires. Once you get a copy of the regulation or instrument and explanatory statement that usually comes with it there is still the issue of interpreting the impact of these instruments. This can be a quite rushed process, so it would be good to have these regulatory impact statements to make our job easier in scrutinising subordinate legislation.

I would not think this legislation would impose much additional burden on the government. I assume that the government would already be assessing the impacts of its regulations as part of their development, so it should only be a matter of tidying this

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