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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 313 ..

MR STANHOPE: Absolutely. This is a major Westminster principle. It is about cabinet solidarity and the need for a cabinet and a government to accept responsibility for the actions of the government. I am sure there is no starker illustration anywhere in any Westminster parliament of the subversion of the notion of cabinet solidarity than this. One cabinet minister responsible for the administration of a piece of legislation simply bent over and allowed his cabinet colleagues to make his legislation for him, legislation which he now is required to administer.

I will be moving amendments that, as the Chief Minister points out, I had drafted as amendments to the Subordinate Laws Act, a circumstance which the Chief Minister finds odd, for some reason that escapes me. I find the Chief Minister's concern about that even odder.

I turn now to clause 39 of the bill. Once again we raise the spectre of the role of the scrutiny of bills committee in relation to the scrutinising of legislation and the effect of the very good reports of the scrutiny committee on informing debate in this place. Clause 39 of the bill, according to the scrutiny committee, may obstruct access to the law because it permits the incorporation of any other existing document into a statutory instrument. The Commonwealth parliament's scrutiny committees refer to this as "calling up" another document and have often commented adversely on the practice. This is because a person reading the instrument is often left without the text of the document that is called up, or, if there are a number of editions of the "called up" document, there can be some doubt as to which edition is actually referred to by the statutory instrument.

There is also a problem of access. While applauding these amendments, particularly in relation to the Internet and the publication or re-publication of legislation, one applauds the extent to which this bill will make the law so much more widely available to citizens. That is something that has to be applauded. It seems to me that the calling up provisions that are part of clause 39 of the bill to some extent undo the availability of legislation insofar as they refer to other documents that are not part of the legislation, documents which in some circumstances could be quite difficult to get hold of. Then there is always the issue of the re-publication of that document: which particular version are we talking about, which particular edition, where do you go to get it and how much does it cost? We all know how difficult it is, on occasions, to find not only the law but also, in relation to this sort of called-up document, the range of documents that could be included in the list of documents that can be called up. That is even far more problematic. That is a problem that I hope the Attorney will address in his comments on the bill.

I am also concerned, Mr Speaker, with one aspect of part 10.3 of the bill which empowers the Parliamentary Counsel to make editorial amendments and other textual amendments of a formal nature to laws being re-published. The editorial amendments he is permitted to make are limited to such matters as typographical errors, correcting or updating references to laws, numbering of provisions et cetera, and we have no difficulty with that. It is only appropriate that the Parliamentary Counsel should be able, without reference back to the parliament, to make amendments of that sort.

I am concerned, however, with the addition, at the end of the list of the sorts of amendments that the Parliamentary Counsel can make, of the reference to amendments of a kind prescribed by regulation. Perhaps this harks back to the circumstance in relation

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