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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3543 ..

of the single most important parts of the legislation about heritage significance—significantly depart, in the ACT legislation, from those in the national template legislation?

Some of the earlier paragraphs—paragraphs (a) to (d)—roughly translate to what is in the national template legislation. But when you get to paragraphs (e) to (k) there is very little resemblance between what is in the ACT legislation and what is coming to be accepted as national template legislation—in particular, paragraph (f), in relation to heritage significance, which is an absolute doozey. Something has heritage significance if “it is a notable example of a kind of place or object and demonstrates the main characteristics of that kind”.

That defies English. It is a catch-all phrase that could get anything. If I think it is heritage, well it must be; and, if I am a heritage guru, well it certainly must be. I suspect that most external stakeholders have focused on the changes in how things are registered and have not focused on the grounds for putting things on the register. I think we should be focusing on the inconsistency or incomprehensibility of words that say that something has heritage significance if it is a notable example of a kind of place or object and demonstrates the main characteristics of that kind. It is legislative gobbledegook. In this legislation the heritage council is reconstituted. There are 11 people on the council, including two non-voting members: the Conservator of Flora and Fauna and the Chief Planning Executive.

Complaints have been made to me that perhaps the heritage council is not large enough or does not have a wide enough representation of people, especially in areas related to property. If I were of a mind to make bad legislation good, I would be minded to perhaps amend the constitution of the heritage council but, because this is such bad legislation and because the Liberal opposition will be opposing it, I am not minded to do so.

One of the really important issues here, which was the subject of some debate in the last sitting, is the operation of disallowable instruments. In the heritage legislation, functions under the act must be exercised in accordance with any applicable heritage guidelines. They are disallowable instruments. We have not seen any of those disallowable instruments and, when questioned, no real thought has gone into it except to say that the existing heritage guidelines will be translated for the time being and we will then sit down and think about what other heritage guidelines we might have in the future.

This is the first example of the mixed messages and the strange things that have been happening. In accordance with some decisions made in the Liberal Party room some time ago, reflected in a motion debated in this place, we resolved that we did not want to deal with legislation that had substantial amounts of disallowable material underpinning the legislation until we had some inkling of what the government was thinking about in respect of those disallowable instruments. If there was a disallowable instrument, regulation or something that dangled off the piece of legislation, we at least wanted to see drafting instructions.

I wrote to the minister about this. At a meeting I had with the minister about a range of topics he said to me, “Don’t worry about it; we don’t need to introduce any disallowable instruments. There won’t be any disallowable instruments”. I thought, “Gee, that does not really marry with my reading of the bill; I’d better go back and check.” So I went

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