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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Thursday, 11 March 2004) . . Page.. 1130 ..

MRS DUNNE (6.23): I note members’ comments, and I will not be calling a division on this, because I can count. However, I would have appreciated it if, rather than read from his prepared script the reasons why he thought that I was proposing this, the minister had actually listened to my reasons and addressed those.

There is nothing in what I have said that indicates that the Liberal opposition opposes the demerit point system. What I said was that, as the system is currently codified, you need to refer to three or four different sources to work out whether someone has actually incurred a demerit point. We do not have a problem with the demerit point system; we have a problem with the way the regulations are executed.

First we say that you have breached clause so-and-so of the Building Bill, then we go to the Building Bill to see what “skilful” means—we know what that means—and then we have to go off and look at a range of standards under Australian Standards. We should cut to the chase and say, “You breach it if you do not comply with the standards,” and cut out all the middle stuff. This provides clarity. This means that members of the building fraternity understand what they have to do without going to several different standards, as things currently stand. I think this is a fault with the system.

There is no problem with the notion of a demerit point system, and I recognise that this is early days with the demerit point system. I fully envisage that over time we will come back here and amend these regulations. But the minister should have done me the courtesy of listening to the arguments rather than dismissing what was said and reading from the script. This is not a contention that the demerit point system is wrong; this is a contention that the regulations as they currently stand lack clarity.

There is no dispute that there should be demerit points for doing things that do not meet the standards, but it should be in the regulations what the standards are, rather than having to refer to the Building Act and then to the Australian Standards. It would be much better to do it another way, and this is why I have moved this amendment. It was not to say that we should not have these.

Everybody in this place and in the entire industry understands that these regulations are the nuts and bolts of the disciplinary process. No-one is seriously saying that we should not be doing this. Everyone recognises that this is an improvement on the current arrangement, but it could be much better and it could have been better if the regulations were better executed. This is why I think that, for the sake of clarity, we should be not having this set of regulations. That is not to say that there should not be regulations like this, but it is incumbent upon the government to come back with clearer regulations.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (6.27): In response, I hear what Mrs Dunne is saying, but there has been no proposition of a better way to do it. It is quite irresponsible, given that we have already passed the Building Bill, to say, “Oh, by the way, we are going to junk your demerit point system, which is integral to imposing discipline in the building industry.” There has been no proposition from the opposition of what the alternative is. There has been no proposition from the industry of what the alternative is either. This is a significant step forward.

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