Page 1582 - Week 04 - Thursday, 25 March 2010
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backyard motor vehicle repairers were springing up, so much so that the MTA’s best guess is that only 60 to 70 per cent of motor vehicle repairers in the ACT are licensed by ORS.
Inappropriate trading practices were going on. Operators were misleading customers about the quality of the parts that they were installing in their cars. They were misleading them about whether repairs were required at all, and they were overcharging them.
The industry, through the code committee, was so sure that legislative reform was required that it actually sat down and wrote the legislation that it wanted. It sent the draft legislation to JACS in the letter of 31 August 2009. Based on the New South Wales legislation, it was a comprehensive piece of drafting. It contemplated, amongst other things, an extensive licensing regime, with specialist licences for a wide range of specialist skills that are now required. It prescribed training and professional development programs for people in the industry. It required training qualifications to be a prerequisite for submitting licence applications.
Importantly, the draft legislation had the unanimous endorsement of the code committee, including its chair, the head of the Office of Regulatory Services. All the members of the code committee, representing industry and government, considered that the draft legislation adequately covered all the need for industry regulation into the future.
But what happened to the draft legislation? Quite frankly, it disappeared into a black hole. After all the years of discussion, culminating in the Attorney-General’s written support for the approach that the MTA saw as necessary, the code committee unanimously agreed with the MTA’s draft legislation and unanimously agreed that it should be sent to JACS.
The bill that Mr Corbell presented to the Assembly on 19 November last year bore absolutely no resemblance whatever to the draft that the MTA sent to JACS 2½ months earlier. And it was not faithful to the letter that Mr Corbell wrote to the MTA on 19 August 2008, in which he said:
Significant consultation with industry would also be required. As such it is not possible for this legislation to be developed prior to the election.
What happened after the election? Any thought of consultation went straight out the door. It is a sort of reprise of the MPI that Mr Coe has just led in this place. There was none, and this Attorney-General introduced a bill in November 2009, a year after the 2008 election, that had been devised without any consultation. All the years of work and effort by the MTA had been for naught.
And then what was Mr Corbell’s attitude in relation to this? Much like the two crimes bills that we are also scheduled to debate today, he sought to bring back the motor vehicle repair industry bill with only three weeks between its introduction and its proposed time for passage, giving little time for anyone, let alone industry stakeholders, to consider the bill before it looked as though we were going to debate it
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