Page 3927 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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Mr Stanhope’s suite of amendments include both amendments that the government wished to make and further amendments that the Greens wanted to make to our original bill. Many of the amendments have been through a number of iterations in discussion between our two offices. I am very pleased that the government was willing to take on my recommendations for amendments; we have agreed and ended up with a good scheme. I must say that I look forward to being able to work in this cooperative way again in the future. This offer is, of course, extended to the Liberal Party, despite the fact this bill was not one they supported. I would note, however, that we have just had a cooperative arrangement with supporting Mr Smyth’s motion and my amendment to it earlier today. In the context particularly of the federal election results, I now look forward to more cooperative assemblies and parliaments in general.
Going back to the amendments, I did seek assurances from the government that they have consulted on the amendments. The government have not yet provided me with details of the comments, however, I have been assured—and I do know—that the government did undertake considerable consultation on these amendments. Mr Stanhope mentioned some of the feedback in his speech, and I understand that the feedback has been fairly positive.
As I said in our previous debate, I consulted widely on my original bill, especially with retailers. The feedback I received was also generally positive. Probably the main issue raised by retailers was the impracticality of putting a unique identifier on their trolleys. I must say that the Greens agree this is too onerous and it would stop retail chains being able to move their trolley fleets between different stores. Instead, we have suggested that rangers put out a unique notice sticker to any trolleys they find and need to identify, and Mr Stanhope’s amendments cover off this important issue.
I will briefly now touch upon comments from the scrutiny committee, which identified a number of issues with the amendments and the comments from the human rights commissioner, who looked at both the original bill and the amendments. We were very pleased to receive this feedback. As Mr Stanhope will recall, I requested specifically that the amendments go through the scrutiny committee, and I am satisfied that issues raised by the committee have received an appropriate response in the amendments.
The human rights commissioner also provided comments about the way the legislation interacts with human rights. My concern in the original bill was to ensure the legislation did not disproportionately impact on people who are at socioeconomic disadvantage, like homeless people. The human rights commissioner wrote additional comments to me confirming that the Greens’ bill improved the existing Litter Act offences in terms of human rights. She recommended that finetuning some of this drafting would improve this further, and we welcomed all advice and suggestions from the commissioner.
One of the amendments in the suite introduced by Mr Stanhope requires that an authorised person cannot give a direction to an individual to return a trolley if it would be harsh and unreasonable in the circumstances. This is an amendment which was introduced at the insistence of the Greens and is designed to improve the fairness of
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