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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2553 ..

the election in October; otherwise the right to remove that disallowance becomes meaningless.

There is less cause for concern if the legislative framework for a particular area is already well settled and new regulations are only making changes of a minor or technical nature. The concern, however, is in relation to new bills passed by the Assembly, as this government is in the habit of presenting new legislative regimes to the Assembly in an incomplete form and filling in crucial details later through delegated legislation.

I take the words of the Treasurer to heart that there is a commitment from this government to not break caretaker conventions. However, there is before us a raft of legislation to be debated where an extensive amount of detail to make this legislation work is tied up in regulations—regulations that we will not have seen at the time of debating the legislation. The Financial Management Act amendment is one such example. As I understand, the government hopes to pass this bill this or next week and then find the urgent circumstances that permit the use of the Treasurer’s Advance through subordinate legislation.

Another example is the health practitioners bill, which may be passed during these sittings without the content of its accompanying regulations being known to the Assembly. This is a controversial bill, and it is possible that one or more members of the Assembly could have concerns about the regulations governing its implementation. So much detail is caught up in the regulations for how these laws are going to be implemented.

The government may believe that some of the new regulatory regimes contained in the swag of bills on the current notice paper must be implemented before the election. This motion debated today gives the government time to re-order the notice paper to get the relevant bills debated and passed during this sitting period. They can then get the regulations drafted in time for introduction by 16 August. Alternatively, they could incorporate the material they intend to put in regulations into the principal act, which means that they could be debated and passed in August, with all the information before the Assembly.

If there has not been enough consultation on the content of the regulations, the government may have to make interim regulations that get replaced either late this year or early in 2005. This could be an inconvenience for the government and place some pressure on Parliamentary Counsel, but it is always going to take a little bit of work to get a democratic system to work properly. Following this motion will be consistent with the convention of a caretaker period, which the government has said it is committing to and which is well accepted. We have all seen lengthy guidelines that have been circulated through this Assembly on how the caretaker conventions will work.

Although the government is able to implement major policy decisions, there is a blurred line between decision making and implementation, where crucial details of a legislative regime are left to regulations. A responsible government should inform the Assembly of anything it thinks could generate serious objections. This is akin to a responsible board of directors informing the market of anything that is likely to affect the share price of their company.

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