Page 1052 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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That is the problem with majority government in the ACT. There are no checks and balances and if one group controls nine votes, heaven help everybody else. What we are actually seeing here today is essentially the Greens’ reaction to those sorts of events. That is the standout one in my mind and I am sure that other members will have other examples. But I do not know that in the circumstances in which we now find ourselves that it is necessary.
I remember many times coming down to this place to debate a bill and suddenly having the government drop 10, 15 or 20 pages of amendments which we knew were finalised, because you can read it on the bottom of the amendments when they are printed, days before. We got them sometimes minutes before or if we were lucky hours before. That will not happen in this Assembly because if any minister tries to do that there are enough people in the Assembly to stop it and say, “Okay, we will agree to this bill in principle and then we will adjourn debate and we will go and look at the amendments.” What we have actually got here is a situation in which we are fixing up retrospectively a problem we had in the last Assembly and which we will not encounter in this Assembly.
We had a discussion in the scrutiny of bills committee. I think the first version did not refer directly to government bills. There was discussion in the committee, and there has been discussion with other members, that if this process is not dealt with generously we can derail the entire legislative program of any of the groups in this Assembly. Simply by putting some previously undiscussed amendments on the table at the last minute, you slow down the process by one sitting week at least.
I have had discussions with many people about how this should not work like this and it should not be used as a tool to slow down the legislative process. This is why we ended up with an amendment that relates to government amendments. I have got some bills on the notice paper, Mr Seselja does and Ms Hunter has bills on the notice paper. If we say that we want to list these for debate, suddenly the government can bring its government amendments to those bills and slow down the process for at least one sitting week. But we do not have the same capacity, nor should we have the same capacity, to do that to the government and slow down that process.
I have circulated an amendment that inserts after the word “government” the words “to its own bills” so that if the government wants to amend its own bills, that matter needs to go to the scrutiny of bills committee. Probably if we agree to this it actually points out to some extent the futility of it. I take the minister’s point that it seems anomalous that non-executive bills will not be affected by this.
In this Assembly it is more likely that we will see non-executive bills getting up and being debated. For instance, in the last two sitting weeks, I have successfully steered through two non-executive bills, and this will happen more and more. There will be more private members’ business that becomes law in the ACT. To an extent, this amendment as it is proposed requires a higher level of scrutiny for government legislation than it does for non-executive legislation, and that is anomalous.
My instincts and the instincts of the Canberra Liberals are not to support this change to the standing orders. We definitely will not support it unless our amendment is
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