Page 567 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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their views.” Where I come from, that is not consultation. If you were truly committed to consultation, if you were not coming off the back of four years of majority government where you could do whatever you liked, what you actually do is say, “We have got a problem,” or at least, “We perceive that there is a problem out there.” I think there is a fair argument that there is a problem. You pull in the stakeholders, you sit down and have a conversation and you say, “How can we fix this problem?”
But in fact what the government did was say, “We have the plan. We are going to table it and then we will go out and seek some rubberstamping exercise.” That is not consultation and that is why I think it is valuable to send this to a committee and have a process of sitting down, calling the stakeholders in, as Mrs Dunne proposes under her motion, through the justice and community safety committee, and seeking some views to help us find the best answer to the perceived problem that we have. That is why we will be supporting Mrs Dunne’s motion to send this to a committee.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (8.42): I move:
Omit “September”, substitute “June”.
The government is proposing that the reporting date for the committee be the end of June rather than the end of September. The end of September is over half a year to conduct an inquiry on a bill which is, I think, in the order of two pages. I do not have it in front of me but it is not a very big bill; it is not a very complex bill.
The change itself, in legislative terms, is quite straightforward. I acknowledge that some of the concepts at play are contested and have a variety of perspectives from different stakeholders but I really have to question whether seven months is the quite significant period of time that the committee really needs to do this work. I am suggesting 4½ months.
The expectations from the Greens and others have put upon us delivery of a whole range of legislative proposals in very short time frames. For example, we have had to deliver within three months a whole new regime for the implementation of a feed-in tariff, for example. We have done that. We have met that. We have worked hard and we have done it. But I do not really understand why the government has to go hell for leather and make sure that everything is introduced as soon as possible and as quickly as possible but the committees can take their time; they can take half a year to think about this. I wish I had the luxury of taking half a year to think about a whole range of policy issues but I do not.
These issues are not so complex and so onerous that it is not possible for an Assembly committee to consider them in a reasonable period of time. But I would argue that seven months is quite unreasonable and really is simply an attempt to delay this matter. Four-and-a-half months is a reasonable period of time and that is why the government is proposing it.
I respond also to the comments made by Mr Rattenbury in relation to consultation. It is an interesting take that the Greens have on consultation because, of course, that is
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