Page 1163 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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him for more action in this area. For now, however, on balance, the risk of an act of terrorism is likely to be small in the ACT and so the scheme is unlikely to be put under serious stress. So we are happy to support the further extension of time.
Before I finish, I would like to comment on the utterly unhelpful manner in which the minister has handled this bill and provided information to the Assembly. In reviewing the bill and preparing advice for my party colleagues, my office, on 10 March, rather than seeking a formal briefing on the bill, sent an email asking one simple question. That question was:
Can you—
the minister’s office—
tell me if other states and territories still have similar arrangements in place as does the ACT and, if so, the sunset dates for those arrangements.
That seemed to be a simple question. My office sent another email on 12 March asking whether an answer would be forthcoming. My senior staff made two phone calls to the minister’s office following up on that and finally made a request to the senior staff of the manager of opposition business at the government business meeting to see if we could get an answer to our questions. All of this resulted in a nil return.
My senior staff sent a further email on my behalf to the minister himself on 19 March. After a couple of exchanges during the course of that day, the minister provided a response that utterly failed to answer the simple question originally posed. It consisted of a regurgitation of what was in the explanatory memorandum, which we can read for ourselves, and a statement of the bleeding obvious about the ACT’s independence as a workers compensation jurisdiction and claims that the government did not collect interstate information.
Needless to say, Mr Speaker, by this stage I had become completely frustrated by the service provided by the minister’s office and the final waffling non-answer, so we decided to ask for a formal briefing so that we could put a simple question to officials. What was the response? Well, there were more emails, but nothing about arranging a briefing, though, until sometime on Saturday when the minister, said, “We’ll see if we can arrange something.” Then yesterday I got more emails—the day before the debate was about to take place and fully two weeks after that simple question was asked—and my staff got an email that started:
If you bothered to wait, this office was agreeable to providing detail.
This is a fortnight afterwards. It then went on again to regurgitate the material in the explanatory memorandum, but it did provide a tiny bit more information along the lines of what we had asked for. Firstly, it said that there had been consultation on this bill. With whom did that consultation taken place? Did it take place with the Insurance Council? No, Mr Speaker, it took place with the ACT Insurance Authority. So the ACT government consulted itself about the extension of the sunset clause in this bill. There seems to have been no consultation outside the government.
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