Page 2538 - Week 07 - Thursday, 18 June 2009
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The Justice and Community Safety Legislation Amendment Bill 2009 (No 2) is the 21st bill in a series of bills dealing with legislation within the Justice and Community Safety portfolio. These bills make minor and technical amendments to portfolio legislation. The bill I am introducing today makes the following amendments.
Minor amendments have been made to the Associations Incorporation Act 1991 to incorporate the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts with regard to regulating incorporated associations. The amendments will allow for the Registrar-General to begin the process for cancelling an association’s incorporation after the association has failed to submit an annual return for two consecutive years. The amendments will also allow for cancellation proceedings to begin if the association has filed an annual return with qualified audits where the auditor is unable to affirm whether or not the association has complied with the accounting requirements and other provisions of the act.
The bill clarifies the activities that are exempt from the operations of the Charitable Collections Act 2003. The Charitable Collections Regulation 2003 currently provides that entities that do not solicit donations or that do not conduct elections are not bound by the Charitable Collections Act simply because they receive a donation. The bill includes this exemption in the text of the act itself to ensure that there will be no dispute when reading the provisions of the act that these sorts of activities are exempt from the requirements of the act.
The bill makes changes to the Door-to-Door Trading Act 1991. The amendments to this act improve the ACT’s consumer protection regime by clearly stating the manner in which the act applies to telemarketers. The bill would make it explicit in the act where and how its provisions apply to unsolicited telephone calls to consumers. This will ensure that when traders solicit business from ACT consumers by phone those consumers receive all the same protections and notices of their rights under the law as consumers who are contacted in person. Of particular importance, the bill would require telemarketers to provide all of the requisite notifications about a consumer’s rights by reading the standing notices aloud and then providing the notices in paper form as soon as possible after the making of a contract by phone.
To improve convenience to consumers and to allow for businesses to comply with competing legal obligations, the act is also proposed to be amended to remove the prohibition on providing services during the standard 10-day cooling-off period. This change would still allow consumers to cancel agreements and to avoid being charged for services provided before the end of the cooling-off period.
The bill makes amendments to the Firearms Act 1996 to allow for the Australian Federal Police to continue to provide training to, and conduct joint training with, foreign police officers in the ACT. The amendments provide an exemption to the firearms regulations and prohibitions for foreign police officers so that those officers may possess firearms while engaged in training conducted by the AFP and carried out within the jurisdiction of the ACT.
Amendments are proposed to the Legal Aid Act 1977 to recognise the governance structure under which the Legal Aid Commission operates. A series of amendments
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