Page 5590 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Amendment (3) is quite detailed. The first part calls upon the government to provide to members, by close of business on 25 November, a more detailed explanatory statement for classifying the amendments in technical amendment 2010-31 as technical amendments, and on how it determines which amendments are technical or not.
Firstly, I have given ACTPLA an extra week to do this because I thought they probably would need it. As far as getting more information is concerned, if we want more information I think it would be useful to get it, given the huge level of confusion on this issue. I think it would be useful to find out from ACTPLA more about how they determine whether an amendment to the territory plan should be a full draft variation or a technical amendment. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be anything in between, but that I will come to in a moment. Paragraph (3)(b) reads:
consider improving the legislation and processes around technical amendments, including …
What I am proposing today is that ACTPLA improve the process around technical amendments. I can understand that it is too unwieldy to have to go through an 18-month process for all changes to the territory plan. That is what happens with a full draft variation of the territory plan. There are two rounds of consultation, including one through the Assembly planning committee, which being a member of—as you are, Madam Deputy Speaker—I am aware takes a while.
Unfortunately, our current legislation only allows for full territory plan variations either with a full variation process or through a technical amendment process such as the one we are discussing today. What we have identified today, and from the information that we have received from a variety of community and industry groups, is that there is probably room for another type of amendment to the territory plan. That why I have inserted (i):
retaining technical amendments as notifiable instruments, while ensuring that these are actually technical and are policy neutral …
and (ii):
introducing a new level of variation to the Territory Plan, which allows for minor policy changes and is disallowable …
The full draft variation process should also be retained as is, and I have not heard any proposals for anything else. I can understand that there is a need to have a process for small, fast variations, especially for error variations and for minor non-policy change-type variations. I do not propose to change this; rather just to limit the type of changes that can be done in this fashion.
I have heard calls for this technical amendment process to be a disallowable one rather than a notifiable one so that the Assembly has the opportunity to veto proposals. However, if the timing of an amendment is bad, it could be a two-month wait for an amendment to be disallowed. What we want to do is correct the fact that if someone
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video