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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (13 March) . . Page.. 1072 ..

MR STANHOPE

a new regulation to the effect that both a transgender person and an intersex person are taken to be of the sex with which they identify, for the purpose of that regulation.

I will conclude by thanking all members for their support for this extremely important legislative package. With the passage of this legislation today, the Assembly has amended 37 separate acts. I think that is a significant law reform effort by the Assembly. I am very pleased that the government has pursued this law reform project to this point.

In the context of that, Mr Speaker, I wish to acknowledge the significant work that has been undertaken within my department and by officers working on this law reform project. As I indicated previously, it was around March last year that I first asked my department to undertake an audit of all ACT legislation. That is laid out before us and gives some indication of the size of the task, with a view to identifying all the pieces of legislation in the ACT that discriminated against same-sex couples.

That in itself was a significant piece of work. That work was undertaken by senior policy officers within the Department of Justice-Bronwyn Leslie and Frances Brown. As a result of that first work, 70 pieces of legislation were identified, 37 of which have been amended today. There is, as we know, another round for consideration by the community and the Assembly in relation to other, more problematic, issues when it comes to community attitude and response.

I should say that, in addition to identifying those pieces of legislation that did discriminate, Ms Leslie and Ms Brown then drafted the issues paper-significant work that was fundamental to the consultation process undertaken by the government in relation to this. The issues paper is an enormous credit to both Bronwyn Leslie and Frances Brown. I thank and commend them for the work they did in the production of that document. It is a valuable document of enormous utility.

Ms Leslie and Ms Brown also then instructed the Office of Parliamentary Counsel to proceed to amend these 37 pieces of legislation, which was a significant bit of work in itself. The task of instructing Parliamentary Counsel in the amendments that need to be made is a major undertaking.

As a result of that, the drafting officers in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, Mr Nick Horne and Mr John O'Donovan, drafted the package that has been debated today. I thank Nick Horne and John O'Donovan for the significant work they did in drafting this legislative package.

I thank my legal policy adviser, Geoff Gosling, who has been part and parcel of this reform process from the start. I also thank Andrew Barr. He is a member of John Hargreaves's staff and was a consultant to my office on this legislative reform package. He was an important and significant part of the response by my office, especially in the consultation phase of this piece of legislation.

I thank very much Bronwyn Leslie, Frances Brown, Nick Horne, John O'Donovan, Geoff Gosling and Andrew Barr, all of whom played a most significant part in the development of this major law reform package that has been brought to fruition here today.

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