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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 808 ..

timeframe that certain public servants would have liked, but at the end of the day we are elected representatives of the community. We are here to serve those people; we are not here to do our bidding. We are not here to indulge ourselves and we certainly are not here to be dictated to by staff as to how we should do our job. I don’t think it is appropriate for staff to handle people from this industry in anything but a polite and courteous way. I have had complaints to my office that this has occurred and it causes me great concern. There have been a variety of emails exchanged on this topic. There seems to be some misapprehension by the office of the Minister for Planning that the industry was generally happy. One of the issues raised was that of retrospectivity.

I received an email today. It was sent by the HIA on behalf of both the HIA and the MBA, which I forwarded. It stated that the issues that continue to be of concern are: the appointment of the registrar, which is considered to be the most important; development of codes of practice; a cap on demerit points; and retrospectivity rectification. On the nominees, they claim that the government did make some changes yesterday that went some way to alleviating their concerns, which were tidied up completely, but if we were able to achieve positive outcomes on the points above, which I mentioned a little while ago, we could let this one pass. As noted, the government has indicated that this will happen, so, although we would like to see it legislated, we could again let this one pass. The concern that I have is that the industry are attempting to compromise. They have made it clear what they are attempting to compromise on and what they find a little bit difficult to compromise on.

My concern is that a number of members in this place have written to the minister’s office asking that this legislation be postponed until the industry’s concerns are addressed—not our concerns, not staff concerns, not the empire building that I see going on in this building and others, but industry concerns. These bills will affect industry. Remember that we—that is members and staff—are not here to self-indulge ourselves; we are here to serve the community and the industry. They are begging us to do something. They are saying, “Please, we know we’re a little late with some of our concerns. Yes, you have consulted with us and, yes, we’ve all consulted with them and, yes, they’re not perfect”. There you go: we are all fallible.

At the end of the day, I do not like getting comments like, “We are proceeding anyway,” despite the fact that we are continually raising these concerns. We do not do it very often in the way it was done last week. We have raised concerns that we feel need to be addressed and they should be addressed. These people do not work for us; we work for them. Frankly, I find it rather irritating that people think that they are above the people they are here to serve. Given that this is only an in-principle debate, I will leave it at that. But we will debate this matter further when we bring it on next week.

MS DUNDAS (6.49): In principle I will be supporting this suite of bills—the Building Bill 2003, the Construction Occupations (Licensing) Bill 2003 and the Construction Occupations Legislation Amendment Bill 2003—that we are debating today. They are a fundamental overhaul of the rules governing the building and construction industry in the territory. I appreciate the significant amount of time and consultation that have gone into these bills since the exposure drafts were released and particularly since the bills were tabled in the Assembly in November last year.

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