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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3759 ..

real dissension, with the bill. I would suggest, as I think I have the nod, that we should now be able to get on with it and clear up this bill tonight.

MRS DUNNE (6.14): I take the opportunity to comment on the consultation report that the minister brought down today. Yes, it is a bill on which there has been consultation; but, just because you have a whole lot of input, it does not meant that the output is necessarily a good thing. During the consultation of the past two weeks, one of the things that I said to the people who said to me that they had reservations about the bill was, “If you decide that you do not have reservations about the bill, feel free to say so; it is not a juggling matter.” All of them did eventually come back and say, “This has been taken into consideration and that has been taken into consideration and I am now comfortable.”

I had to move the motion that I did last week, which, although it was not adopted, got the message through loud and clear. There were members of the community who were saying that they just needed time to understand this bill and there were staff of this place who were circulating emails saying not to worry about it as everyone was happy with it, whereas there were people who were not happy because they had not had an opportunity to absorb it and determine whether they were happy with it. Until they actually knew what was in it, they could not give it a definitive tick off. They have now had that opportunity and they are giving it a definitive tick off. The minister, Mr Wood, is right: consultation does not mean that you take on board everything that everybody says, but you have to ensure that people get a good hearing.

What has happened with this sorry saga is that the government has been saying, “Because we did it for a long time, that is good enough.” If you really want a model in community consultation, Mr Minister, you should turn to the model that you commenced with the development in this place of the Environment Protection Bill. That did take a number of years. It took about four years for the whole consultation to come about. We ended up with a bill that sailed through this place without a murmur, without a whimper. There were people in the community who really would have preferred that certain things were not in that bill, and they do to this day. But it was a model in consultation; a model started by this minister. It is a shame that he could not take it up with this one as well. It was a model in consultation because it was done in a way that everyone knew that they had had their day in court. Everyone was heard and they knew that their issues had been considered and were not dismissed out of hand.

Mr Wood has got himself into a bit of a problem here. The consultation report is not about inputs; it is about outcomes. The outcomes that we had last week were very poor. They have been better this week, but we should never have been in a situation whereby we had to adjourn debate to go off and consult with people. As a result of that consultation, we have almost 20 more government amendments to this bill; so it was worth it to get the government to go off and sort it out. There are still things which are wrong with this bill, which will not be able to be fixed tonight and which will have to be revisited in the next Assembly.

Clauses 1 and 2 agreed to.

Clause 3.

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