Page 5277 - Week 12 - Thursday, 28 October 2010
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more than satisfactorily taken into account in existing sections 78(d) to (j), which take account of things such as noise to come from the venue, the fire safety of the building, the number of people likely to be attracted to the venue and, importantly, any other relevant matter. We believe these are ample grounds to judge the suitability of the venue without resorting to the convictions of past licensees.
Proposed new amendment 1.23A negatived.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (12.23): I move amendment No 1 circulated in my name which inserts new amendment 1.23A [see schedule 2 at page 5351].
This amendment, along with amendment No 2, which I will move in a little while, addresses the issue that the minister has raised in his amendment which has just failed. As I said in the debate on Mr Corbell’s amendment, it is important that decisions about issuing, amending or renewing a licence should link the performance of the premises with the licence applicant. This section, particularly subsections (a) and (b), as they are currently drafted, do not do that. This is confirmed by the operations of sections 25, 27, 75 and 76. I will not elaborate further on those.
Members will note that this amendment and the one that I will move in a moment are identical to those I proposed during the debate on the principal act in August. You will recall, Mr Assistant Speaker, that I wrote to the Speaker about that matter, and the fact that this was in the same terms as the previous one, to seek his advice on whether it was possible to move this amendment. There has been general agreement that there is sufficient difference from Mr Corbell’s amendment today to make it possible to move this amendment.
In that debate Mr Corbell commented that sections 78(a) and 78(b) did not apply to new licence applications. However, this bill carries an amendment to that section adding a note to the effect that the section does indeed require that the commissioner consider the suitability of premises when deciding to issue, amend or renew a licence permit. Issuing a licence could include issuing a licence to a new licence applicant. The approach that the minister was proposing to take does change the tenor somewhat, but they do not provide specific legislative amendment and I think the problem was that the note is not sufficient.
As I said before, in the August debate I wrote to the Speaker. Mr Rattenbury, as the Greens spokesman on justice and community safety, also expressed some reservations about the intent of the sections and commented:
… if it does turn out that there are unintended consequences of the act—and this is clearly a debate about interpretation, to some extent—we will certainly be willing to revisit this matter in future.
I note Mr Rattenbury’s comments on this in his previous remarks. It is clear, and my staff and I have had extensive discussions with officials about this, that there is a great deal of ambiguity about what this means. The clear words of the act in section 78 leave it open to interpretation that still the past performance of the premises will be taken into account even though the current licence applicant had nothing to do with that performance.
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