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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1550 ..

42 (1) E which says that a disciplinary ground is, amongst other things, that the architect has been found guilty in the ACT or elsewhere of an offence involving fraud, dishonesty or violence that is punishable by imprisonment for one or more years. I can understand fraud or dishonesty but I am not sure about violence. We do not have “fit and proper persons tests” in the ACT.

I explored ways of addressing this with the drafter. Perhaps I should have had a backup amendment—that is something we should consider in future. As far as I know there are no provisions in other laws that would make violence a disciplinary ground. I stand to be corrected if that is it not the case. It certainly is it not the case in New South Wales and I wonder why—I know that we abhor violence—it would be a disciplinary ground so that a person could no longer practise as an architect. I can understand fraud, dishonesty and incompetence, but we just have to raise the question about that issue. There is no amendment that would delete it, and I probably should have had a backup amendment to do so. I raise it as a matter of concern.

MS DUNDAS (5.35): I too noted with concern this piece of the legislation but, as with Mrs Dunne, it was quite a difficult piece of the legislation to amend. As I stated earlier I am not going to support Mrs Dunne’s amendment, but I thank her for raising those issues with this particular clause of the bill. It is something we are going to need to keep an eye on.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (5.36): The government will not be supporting Mrs Dunne’s amendment No 3. Without going into too much detail, Mrs Dunne’s amendment means that an architect must do something serious enough to warrant the cancellation or suspension of their registration before action can be taken on a less serious breach. That is because the “unsatisfactory professional conduct” upon which the finding of professional misconduct is based becomes a disciplinary ground only after the architect has committed professional misconduct; the board cannot take disciplinary action until a disciplinary ground exists.

In essence, the registered architect must have done something serious enough to warrant cancelling their registration before you could then deal with lesser disciplinary grounds that might only have warranted a reprimand. That is clearly not an appropriate approach where you want to be able to issue reprimand for less serious offences without having to first meet the threshold test of a serious misconduct charge and potential cancellation of the right to practice. The problem, I think, is that Mrs Dunne is trying to impose part of a complaints process and definitions from New South Wales into the ACT bill, which has a specified disciplinary process needing specified disciplinary grounds. The justification for Mrs Dunne’s amendments is to harmonise with the New South Wales provision but it is important to put things in perspective.

The government’s bill, as with the reforms completed in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, is only the beginning of the harmonisation process. It was also recognised during the negotiations on the harmonisation principles that each jurisdiction would have local variations that reflected their preferred legislative and administrative approach. Not every jurisdiction has definitions for both “unsatisfactory professional conduct” and “professional misconduct”. In fact, the Northern Territory and Tasmania do not define either term.

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