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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (1 April) . . Page.. 1129 ..

MR WOOD (Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services, Minister for the Arts and Heritage and Minister for Police and Emergency Services (11.50): I table a revised explanatory statement for this bill. It removes something from the earlier statement that did not need to be there.

MS TUCKER (11.50): The Greens are prepared to support this bill in principle, but we have several reservations about how the legislation will operate and the way it has come before us.

The Minister cites the bill's objectives as being to:

promote proper management and administration of collections for charitable purposes;

ensure proper record keeping and auditing of accounts in relation to collections; and

ensure that the public has access to information relating to collections.

While these objectives are fine, it is not clear from the explanatory statement or the minister's speech that the bill will achieve these objectives without adversely affecting charitable collection efforts.

The genesis of the bill was a national competition policy review in 1999 of the existing legislation by the Allen Consulting Group on behalf of the former government. This bill implements the bulk of that review's recommendations. Some targeted consultation took place during the review, and since then the government has changed and the new government has picked up the legislation. The government introduced it at our last sitting a couple of weeks ago, while at the same time running a short top-up consultation, and now brings it on for debate, assuring us that no-one has any problems with it. I am not so sure that this sort of consultation truly establishes that.

Recently, established charities were sent the bill and given two weeks to comment on it. This time is hardly adequate for stretched community groups to give proper consideration to the implications of this legislation, just as the time we members have been given to consider this legislation is inadequate.

Further, the information given with the bill does not explain it adequately-certainly not the explanatory statement, the bill itself or the minister's presentation speech. The scrutiny of bills committee said in its report 27:

The scrutiny of bills committee keeps making this criticism, but it keeps on happening. The committee also made this criticism about the Land (Planning and Environment) (Compliance) Amendment Bill.

In each case the scrutiny of bills committee also pointed out specific errors and made various observations and criticisms. The government produced new explanatory statements that corrected the specific errors but did little to address the criticism of explanatory statements that do not explain.

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