Page 5531 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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of their recommendations to move from a review panel to a review. So we have gone through the process of taking it through the Assembly in principle. There were many months to consider it before then.
We then went through a committee process and we got all sorts of recommendations. We responded to those recommendations with a number of amendments. We circulated those amendments well in advance of the debate. The government, having had all of this time, then responded to the committee’s report and made a number of recommendations. We moved on some of those and we gave them to the government and now we are simply arguing about a couple of fine points of detail.
So if anyone has delayed it, it is the government. I am very happy to come back this afternoon on the commencement clause. In fact, I would put it to the Assembly that we do not even need to adjourn this; we can simply break for lunch in a couple of minutes and come back to it after question time. I do not think there is a need to formally adjourn it.
I would say that we have had one year. And we have jumped through every hoop on this legislation to the extent that now everyone in this place, every party in this place, has had the opportunity to comment on it. Every party in this place has had an opportunity to make submissions and every party in this place, in the end, will have contributed something to the bill. It is our bill originally; the committee process has contributed, and a number of the recommendations from the committee process have been taken on board; the government has responded to that; and we have taken some of those recommendations on board.
To argue differently, to make these arguments that the Chief Minister is seeking to make now, is simply to hide the fact that they have opposed it at every stage because they want to keep doing things as they are. When they realise they could not oppose it, they have sought to delay it. The problem with what Mr Stanhope has put forward is that all it does is push the commencement date back. It does not solve any of the administrative issues that Mr Stanhope claims exist. The government have had one year to look at this issue and they have dragged their feet. We have—
Mr Stanhope: We got the amendments at 10 past nine this morning.
MR SESELJA: He interjects again. The only reason those amendments have been coming is in response to the government’s very late response. They had months to respond to the committee, they had a year to respond to the bill, and they come in at the last minute with a number of recommendations. We accepted those in good faith, we moved on a substantive clause and we worked with the government and the Greens on that. So the argument that they have come in late is simply wrong.
Why did the government take so long to respond? Was this that complex? They saw the legislation 12 months ago and they still cannot get their act together. We know why—because they simply do not want this legislation to commence and, if it is going to commence, they want it to commence as late as possible so that they can continue to use government advertising for their own purposes. That is the reason we need to bring in this legislation. That is the reason we needed—
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