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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3704 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

As you would be aware, all States and Territories are signatories to and are bound by the terms of the Uniform Credit Laws Agreement of 1993 ("the Uniformity Agreement"). Under the Uniformity Agreement, each State and Territory agreed to ensure that legislation regulating the provision of consumer credit should be uniform or consistent with the uniform scheme.

In my view, if the Bill is passed by ACT, then ACT will be in breach of the Uniformity Agreement. This is due to clause 10 (2) of the Uniformity Agreement, which provides that a State or Territory must not introduce amending legislation without obtaining 2/3 majority approval of the States and Territories.

"Amending Legislation" is relevantly defined as being legislation amending or adding to the existing Code. In my view, the proposed ACT Bill is "adding" to the obligations already imposed by the Code on credit providers.

Clause 7 (2) provides that a State or Territory ceases to be a party to the Uniformity Agreement if that State or Territory breaches clause 10 (2).

He then points out that UCCCMC does not actually police the role and that that is a matter for the MCCA committee. He indicates that there are two potentially significant policy issues raised by the bill. One is that the code only applies to credit that is provided for personal, domestic or household purposes; it does not apply to business or investment lending. That point is raised in Dave's bill. I am not going to deal with that now, because I think it is more for the detail stage. Also, I do not have any amendments which might get over that-even if it was not going to affect us being in the code or not, which is another argument. But there are a couple of other matters in the detail that UCCCMC say are significant departures from the policy of the code.

UCCCMC go on to say that the New South Wales Department of Fair Trading has been working on a uniform approach, which includes Mr Rugendyke's matters and other matters and is much larger. I do not think Mr Rugendyke has got problems with that. Not only does it do what he wants it to do; it does other things as well.

UCCCMC make comments in relation to uniformity and the benefits that flow from that. On page 3 of their letter, they state:

Uniformity was finally achieved in 1996 with the commencement of the Code. The benefits of uniformity should be lower compliance costs for credit providers, which should be passed onto consumers in the form of lower fees and charges and interest rates.

The current ACT Bill proposes imposing on credit providers a requirement that they undertake different assessment criteria for ACT consumers as opposed to consumers in other States and Territories.

They go on to make some of the points I make.

We think Mr Rugendyke is on the right track. We are happy to support his bill in principle, but because of those very important points I mentioned, if it goes to finality today, we will not be able to support it. I will be happy to adjourn it after we agree to it in principle, which I assume most of the Assembly would like to do.

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