Page 2860 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
(iv) inappropriately delegate legislative powers; or
(v) insufficiently subject the exercise of legislative power to parliamentary scrutiny;
That is what we have to do as a committee. The committee that I chair, which is ably advised by experts in the field, is unstinting. The advisers are unstinting. If the scrutiny of bills committee and the adviser comes up with only half a page of comment on this bill, it is because none of these issues in our terms of reference were engaged. That is what it means. It does not mean, as implied by the Chief Minister yesterday, that we were not doing our job in any way.
This scrutiny of bills committee, which consists of myself, Ms Hunter and Mr Hargreaves—one member of every party in this place—looks at every bill irrespective of its origin, irrespective of the person or the party of the person who puts it forward. It looks at it through the prism of those terms of reference which are published at the front of every report.
The implication yesterday was that because the scrutiny of bills committee have only dedicated a half a page to this bill, the committee and its advisers had stinted, had been lax in their work. What it means is that the scrutiny of bills committee and its adviser had looked at the bill and decided that this bill did not engage in any material or substantial way the terms of reference that we are given by this Assembly.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Land and Property Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (10.53): I thank Mrs Dunne for providing us with that insight into the operations of the scrutiny of bills committee. Mrs Dunne is right: I did read only the first paragraph and then the time for my answer to the question ended. But I would have required only another 20 or 30 seconds and I could, of course, have read the entire scrutiny report. As Mrs Dunne has just said, in fact, there are three sentences in the scrutiny report.
The point I was making, Mrs Dunne—and I will repeat it; I believe the point is moot—is that the scrutiny of bills committee asks the question, as Mrs Dunne has just outlined:
Report under section 38 of the Human Rights Act 2004
Do any clauses of the Bill “unduly trespass on personal rights and liberties”?
In the response to that question that is posed—that is, the question the committee posed to itself—the committee responded in these words:
The current scheme of the Act for random testing in relation to alcohol consumption engages various human rights and particular provisions of the Human Rights Act, such as the right to privacy and the right to liberty.
On the question posed to the human rights commissioner through the discussion paper—do any clauses of the bill unduly trespass on personal rights and liberties, in
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video