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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3910 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

admitted that the Psychologists Act 1994 does not apply to government sector employees. Despite Mr Moore's claim that his amending bill was not designed to give to the board controls over a group previously exempt from the legislation, that is precisely what it does. Government sector employees, and we are talking about a far wider group than school counsellors, have not been required to register under the act at any time in the past. They have never been required to register under this legislation. They will be required to register on passage of Mr Moore's amending bill.

I have said that we support the need for that, that we are in agreement on it. We supported the bill in principle on the basis that we agree with the need to do that. However, despite what the minister says, government sector employees have not had a transitional period in which to sort out with the board what qualifications they require. This is so because those employees have never had to be registered previously. The point is that the employees we are talking about here have never been required to be registered, as a result of which they have never taken steps to sort out their registration.

It may well have been the intention of the 1994 act to require government employees to register, as Mr Moore says. Mr Moore made quite a big play on that. Mr Moore says it was always the intention that government employees should register under the 1994 act and that that is the statable claim of intention of it, but that is not what the legislation requires. As a matter of law and practice, they did not have to and many of them did not, and that is the fundamental point. There was an intention, apparently, that all psychologists register; but the law, the act, did not specifically require them to do so, so many of them did not.

Why would they go to the trouble of seeking registration, paying registration fees and subjecting themselves to the discipline of a board that was concerned only with the private practising of psychology? The argument Mr Moore propounded when we debated this matter previously that it was the intention of the legislation is a nonsense. The government should have defined that that was the intention, but did not; therefore, too bad. But that is simply not acceptable. The intent of the law was not achieved in its provisions, in the law that was passed, and this particular group of counsellors and psychologists did not register. They did not register because they did not have to register.

Why would they have registered? There was absolutely no compulsion on them to register. Any reasonable person thinking about this matter would acknowledge that, because there was no legal requirement, it is ridiculous now to expect that they would have gone out and done it just to comply with or to meet some expectation that apparently was in the ether, that this is what the legislation was intended to achieve. The legislation might have been intended to achieve a range of things, but that is not what the legislation in its form did.

Mr Moore, after concentrating in his speech on the apparent intent, went on to talk about the opening of the floodgates, arguing that if we do not close it off now we will simply open the floodgates and expose our children to unqualified people. He said that we should not allow persons such as career counsellors and human resource officers to seek registration under these provisions. But these people, despite their titles, may be qualified psychologists practising psychology within the territory.

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