Page 1051 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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use of the standing order in certain circumstances. Members will be required to make a judgement in certain circumstances as to whether an amendment is urgent, minor or technical in nature or proposed in response to comments made by the scrutiny committee itself.
This standing order, in my view, will need to be utilised with common sense and practicality. The realities of this place are well known to members, and no doubt there will be circumstances where this standing order will be most sensibly not applied. Not least often, this will occur when amendments are proposed directly in response to scrutiny committee comments.
The proposed standing order is expressed to apply only to government amendments. This is, of course, in some senses anomalous and the government will monitor the progress of the operation of the temporary standing order with a view to possibly proposing down the track an amendment so as to apply such a requirement to all amendments, whether they are executive or non-executive.
The wording of the proposed standing order has been finalised following input from the committee itself, the Speaker’s office and the Clerk, and I would like to thank each of those individuals for their comments and their feedback. I commend the proposed temporary standing order to members.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.53): The Canberra Liberals are concerned about this and we think that for the most part this is an unnecessary standing order. It is true that in my capacity as the chairman of the scrutiny of bills committee I wrote to the minister and asked that we be consulted about this. The scrutiny of bills committee has had input into this. The discussions that we had in the scrutiny of bills committee set me thinking about the problems that can arise from this.
I think what we have seen in this particular clause in the Labor-Green alliance document and many of the other things that are in this is that the Greens, to their credit, are trying to fix all the problems that we encountered with majority government at a time when we have done away with majority government. I think that probably the impetus for this particular amendment to the standing orders comes from some amendments to the Education Act which were forced through in mid-2006.
On the day that we were debating amendments to the Education Act, the minister’s staff came down with some more amendments that related to non-government schools. Dr Foskey and I said: “We are not happy with these amendments. We have not had a chance to consult the non-government schools sector on this. Have you consulted the non-government schools sector?” They said: “No, no, no, but there has been a general discussion and it is all right. It is fine.”
This was an amendment that was forced through with a majority government which, as it turned out about a month later, meant that a non-government school which was contemplating taking over the operation of Tharwa primary school was specifically prohibited from doing so. It was specifically prohibited from doing so because of that amendment that was forced through at the last minute by a majority government.
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