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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 328 ..

fines for corporations and $200,000 fines for individuals for breaches of certain sections of the legislation. However, we cannot present any amendments on these issues, as I would like to, as the business community across Canberra have not been consulted sufficiently to enable them to achieve satisfactory alternative penalties to the ones proposed here today.

I see that the Democrats have some ideas on how that might be addressed. At first blush their ideas looked pretty good to me, but I hope we will have time to be able to consult a little more broadly. While it is clear that the government has undertaken adequate consultation over a few months, particularly with businesses involved in the fireworks industry, it has not really consulted to any reasonable degree with the remainder of the business community.

Whilst the legislation might have gone out to businesses and industries known to handle prescriptive substances—for example, explosives and fuels—and those on the ACT WorkCover registry, we are not confident that all representative agencies on the ACT WorkCover registry and elsewhere were consulted. As I was saying, many businesses and their representative agencies had little idea that this legislation was indeed coming on.

We are talking about the hundreds of small and medium businesses dealing in minor fuels and spirits, pool and cleaning chemicals, powders and cleaning agents, that are going to have to significantly change the way they operate. As I was saying before, these businesses needed the opportunity to provide input to the legislation after it was tabled so that fine-tuning might occur where there are inequities or impracticalities, or where there is a degree of unfairness. I hope the government will now provide that opportunity. One minute before I was to stand to give this speech, the minister indicated that she would like to delay the detail stage of the debate. Perhaps that consultation is going to occur.

The consultation process by the government on the completed legislation was lacking and I hope they will now rectify that. I would therefore, despite the hurried discussions before I stood to my feet, like to move formally that the debate on this legislation be adjourned to allow satisfactory consultation. I agree that we should now go to the point of in-principle discussion.

Ms Tucker: Hold on! We are going to adjourn the debate!

MR PRATT: Thank you for pulling me up, Ms Tucker. I would like to see the detail stage of the debate pushed back so that proper consultation can occur.

MS DUNDAS (4.38): I will start by saying that the ACT Democrats will be supporting this bill in principle. The bill is a result of a long process of examining the ACT’s law in relation to dangerous goods and hazardous substances. The genesis of this bill is the continuing debate about the regulation of fireworks in the territory, which has highlighted the many flaws in our current regulatory system. I think this bill has been designed to provide a more robust response to the regulation of fireworks, as well as giving the ACT modern legislation and powers to control the use and handling of dangerous substances in general.

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