Page 5530 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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MR STANHOPE: So in other words, what you are doing is proposing that all government advertising from this day until the appointment of a reviewer, and until the passage of an appropriation—the budget—to pay for the reviewer, be banned. In other words, there will be no government advertising from today until the next budget.
Mr Seselja: No.
MR STANHOPE: What is the answer? I need to know. This Assembly needs to know. Government agencies need to know. I say to Mr Seselja that, in the context of opposition to this, I have no option but to move that the debate be adjourned until we can get advice on these issues.
Mr Rattenbury: To a later hour this day, Jon?
MR STANHOPE: I am happy for it to be to a later hour this day. But this is clause 2 and it exposes essentially a fundamental flaw in the bill which, as Mr Rattenbury just said, is a result of the fact that this has been crashed through. It is as a result of the fact that we received the Leader of the Opposition’s amendments at 10 past nine this morning. My advisers have advised me that a commencement date as proposed by the Leader of the Opposition, in a bill in which there is another amendment relating to the methodology for appointment of the reviewer which is different from that in the substantive bill, which requires it to come back to the Assembly, means that the legislation is inoperable. Mr Seselja does not have an answer for that. I move:
That the debate be adjourned.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Le Couteur): Mr Stanhope, I am told that you cannot move that as you have already spoken.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (12.21): I will respond to some of what Mr Stanhope has had to say. It is worth setting out some of the timings we have had on this. This bill was presented to the Assembly a year ago. So the government has had one year to consider this bill. That was when it was first presented to the Assembly. It then went through a detailed process. It was debated in this place, it was passed in principle in the Assembly and then it went to a committee process to look at the detail. So one year ago the legislation was introduced; it was then debated and passed in the Assembly in principle. We then sent the detail of the bill to an Assembly committee to examine this issue. This has been a rigorous process and we have seen, at every turn, the government try to block it, oppose it and now simply, as a last resort, to try and delay it.
The government were given ample time not just to examine the bill, not just to have a representative of the Labor Party in the committee to look at it, but then also to respond to the committee’s recommendations. They had the full three months and they waited until late last week to respond.
We circulated our detailed amendments to the government and to the Greens. We then responded to the government’s late response and worked with them and accepted one
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