Page 1322 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 5 April 2005
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Taking this matter a little further, the Minister for Industrial Relations appears to look in just one direction, towards the commonwealth, when making decisions in relation to pay increases. She failed to look towards the private sector and to take into account the consequences of her generous decisions in dispensing taxpayer funds. As a result of that, I have elected to submit a further personal recommendation in the context of my additional remarks to the ACT government that in future wage negotiations with its employees, it take formal account of the impact of such decisions on the private sector and the ACT economy as a whole and publish a territory-wide impact statement.
Mr Speaker, I could comment on many other aspects of this inquiry, but I am conscious that this is primarily the work of the committee and I have tried to confine my remarks to the essential and central expenditure areas and the additional comments and formal recommendations I have made. It is worthy of noting that, in terms of the recommendation, I think all of us are of the view that supporting an appropriation bill or not supporting an appropriation bill is a position that is certainly the negative under rather extraordinary circumstances. I am not of the view that those circumstances exist and, as a consequence, we have a unanimous decision in recommending to the Assembly that the bill be passed.
I shall expand on my comments in the general debate on this bill at a later time.
MS MacDONALD (Brindabella) (12.19): I will be brief. I just place on the record my thanks to the secretariat for their very hard work in getting this report to the Assembly by 31 March, last Thursday. We deliberated on this report on the Wednesday night and finished up just after 6 o’clock. We had hearings on annual reports the next day so the turnaround time on behalf of the secretariat was excellent, especially given that the secretary of the committee was dealing with annual reports hearings. Many thanks to Ms Mikac, the secretary, and, indeed, all of the committee secretariat for having done that.
Because of difficulties with timing, and trying to get this done in time for it to be back in the Assembly, we needed to get the Treasurer to appear before us, and we had to do it during the scrutiny of bills conference which, as members would know, was occurring in this chamber. There were a lot of extra desks from committee rooms in the chamber and they had to be moved back into committee room 1 for the hearing, and then moved back in here for the next day’s conference proceedings. My thanks to the Hansard staff and all of the staff who helped move the furniture around. I commend the report.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Legal Affairs—Standing Committee
Scrutiny report 6
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra): I present the following report:
Scrutiny Report 6 of the Standing Committee on Legal Affairs performing the duty of a Scrutiny of Bills committee, together with the relevant minutes of proceedings.
MR STEFANIAK: I seek leave to make a brief statement.
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