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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1590 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

somebody quite inappropriately in other circumstances. It would be inappropriate for the Assembly not to receive a document which a member wishes to table. Mr Hird and Mrs Burke have supplied me with a copy of their report, which they now hope to table in this place today.

Mr Quinlan: Is that a breach of privilege?

MR HUMPHRIES: No, it is not.

Mr Quinlan: I am a member of the committee. I have not seen it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Because you would not allow it to be produced before.

Mr Quinlan: It has not been tabled in this place.

MR HUMPHRIES: If you had not refused leave, you would have seen it by now, Mr Quinlan.

MR BERRY (12.02): Mr Speaker, I was raising questions when I was rudely sat down earlier. I see that Mr Humphries is waving around a copy of the report, which he plainly applauds. It seems to me, Mr Speaker, that what we are talking about here is the government's report. This is already the government's response to the report. So we can just about work out what is going to be said when we get down to debating this issue in conjunction with the budget.

Mr Speaker, this is an extraordinary effort by these two members. They sat right through the committee debates. These members could have circulated a copy of their dissenting report at any point before the committee's report was tabled in the Assembly. They could have contacted the chairman of the committee and sought his agreement to that sort of approach so that all members in this place could debate what they say in this so-called report in conjunction with what has been said by the majority of the committee in the main body of the report.

Mr Speaker, the problem is that these two members underestimated what they needed to do. In the first place, they have attached their formal dissenting report to the report. Secondly, they have said that they want to have their own separate report-not their own separate dissenting report but their own separate report. They are not entitled to have their own separate report because the Assembly did not authorise some members to have a separate report. Members are authorised under the standing orders to have a dissenting report and attach it to the report. These people are trying to rort the system.

I want to go back to a couple of comments that Mr Humphries made about the quality of Assembly committee reports over the last five or six years. Co-incidentally, that is the period during which this mob have been in government and that is the period during which these committees have been attempting to hold this government accountable. Try as we might, we still could not stop the Bruce Stadium. Try as we might, we still could not stop what the government did down at the hospital implosion. Try as we might, we could not stop the Futsal slab and we could not stop the Hall/Kinlyside affair and all of those sorts of things. But we are now being criticised because of the quality of some of the scrutiny that we have put on this government. I think the government is worrying that

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