Page 1865 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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In the Education Act 2004, amendments will provide that copies of applications for various registrations of schools must be made available for inspection, free of charge, at a departmental office and not specifically the chief executive’s office as it currently stands. They also provide that a person can be an authorised government person and an authorised non-government person at the same time. Finally, the Education Act is amended such that parents of a child whose home registration has been cancelled must enrol the child in an education provider’s course within 14 days of cancellation.
One of the amendments to the Road Transport (Third-Party Insurance) Act 2008 clarifies that the Nominal Defendant will not be liable for personal injuries caused by an unregistered or uninsured motor vehicle that is used for recreational purposes on an area that is not a road or a road-related area. The bill gives the use of a quad bike as an example. This amendment would put more onus on the owners of such motor vehicles to at least carry appropriate public liability or third-party insurance, rather than relying on the government to prop them up. Another amendment will allow an injured person, in certain circumstances, to receive early payment for medical expenses.
Schedule 3 to this bill carries a range of minor technical amendments that are non-controversial. They involve the correction of minor errors, updating language, improving syntax, minor consequential amendments and other minor changes. In particular, a range of definitions common to the road transport legislation has been omitted from various acts and regulations and relocated in the Road Transport (General) Act 1999 dictionary, with relevant signposts provided in the dictionary to the amended acts.
Much of the work is on the initiative of the parliamentary counsel’s office, and once again I am pleased to take the opportunity to congratulate the parliamentary counsel for their dedication to ensuring consistency and readability in our legislation in the ACT. In my experience, the ACT’s statute book is the most accessible and user-friendly in the country. Nowhere else is it as easy to find what I am looking for, check the history and be able to navigate through it and read it with ease. I thank the parliamentary counsel’s office for their good work; their service to members of this place and to the people of the ACT is much valued and appreciated.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.52): The Greens will be supporting this Statute Law Amendment Bill 2010. As has been touched on, statute law amendment bills represent the most appropriate way to keep the ACT statute book up to date and accurate. Each of the amendments contained would generally not warrant an amending piece of legislation in its own right. However, when added together they make for a bill worthy of scrutiny and debate by the Assembly.
The amendments in today’s bill are indeed minor and technical, and I will not go through each specific proposal and make comment. It is enough to say that we have tracked through the changes and agree that they fit into the minor and technical category. In part, these types of bills can rectify past mistakes such as typographical and drafting errors.
Because of this, I was interested to see that this particular bill is shorter than previous bills. The last such bill debated in the Assembly amended over 100 separate pieces of
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