Page 5075 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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amended, transferred or renewed. The same applies for not-for-profit organisation wine permits, which will become non-commercial permits. RSA certificates obtained between 1 December 2009 and 1 December 2011 are taken to be new RSA certificates, expiring on 1 December 2012.
I note that the new regulations and licence fees were notified in the legislation register last week. I will not comment on those matters today but reserve the right to bring the matters forward for debate within the time allowed for that purpose. The time allowed would be by 6 December. It would be unreasonable to do that, and I propose to do this before 17 November this year.
I do need to take a moment to reflect on the government’s failure to provide my office with their amendments to the amending bill. By way of information, there has been considerable backwards and forwards over the issue of liquor licensing amendments, and this goes back to Tuesday of last week. Late on 19 October, my staff advised both the government and the Greens that we would have amendments and we asked whether either the government or the Greens would have any amendments.
Early on 20 October, at 8 am, the government advised my staff that they would have amendments. It subsequently transpired that, at just about 11 o’clock on 20 October, the government sent their amendments to the Greens. At 11 o’clock, about the same time, we sent our amendments to both the Greens and the government. There was a follow-up email the next day, at 10.52, 21 October, to Mr Corbell’s staff from my staff that they understood that the government had sent their amendments to the Greens and were they going to share them with us. The Greens eventually, because we did not know what was going on, shared their version of the government’s amendments with us late last week.
It is clear, as there is a cheat sheet available, that the chamber support staff obviously, and rightly, received a copy of the government’s amendments some time ago as well. I received them and my office received them today at 22 minutes past two, during question time. I think that is unacceptable.
This issue has gone on. It arose a number of times last week. It was the matter of some discussion, I understand, during the whips’ meeting yesterday about sharing these things. We were up-front, because we do have a large number of amendments, and we shared those. We gave notice of them as soon as we could, because we anticipated that this would be debated last week. We shared them with the Greens’ staff and the minister’s staff as soon as we could, as soon as they were in a condition to be circulated. It has been quite clear that from last Wednesday the government’s amendments existed and were available at least to the Greens, and it took until question time today for the same courtesy to be extended to the Canberra Liberals.
The minister has to learn to play nicely in these matters. He has not played nicely on this occasion and, as a result, we will not be progressing the debate beyond the in-principle stage today. I do have to bring it to the Assembly’s attention. This is a complex bill. It has huge implications. This suite of legislation has huge implications for the business viability of people, the employment of people and the safety of people across this territory. And if it is good enough for the opposition, with
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