Page 569 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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recommendations to address systemic, social and environmental issues which are associated with children and young people.
The objective of the bill is to work toward prevention of child and young people deaths through recommendations that will allow the ACT to target our prevention work into the right areas and maintain a consistent approach to quality improvement within our community. I know that all within this place want to see a safe as possible Canberra community for our children and young people.
Once again, I thank Mrs Dunne, Ms Burch and their staff—Clinton White and Chris Steel—who worked with my staff—Melanie Greenhalgh and Tom Warne-Smith—and me to ensure that we could get the best possible bill out of this process. There were a lot of negotiations and discussions. I think it is a good example of where we can work together to provide good legislation for the people of the territory.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.16): I will address the three amendments that are before us at once and conclude my comments. The Canberra Liberals will support the Greens’ amendments to the government’s amendment. It is symbolic that the final clause that is amended is an amendment to an amendment to an amendment because I think it typifies what has gone on in this debate.
This bill was introduced in, I think, August last year. My staff and I have not spent as much time on any other bill—in all the time that I have been in the Assembly—as we have on this bill. It is interesting that I have not moved any amendments to this bill as I have been the godmother of most of the amendments to this bill that makes this piece of legislation much more workable than it was.
There has been a lot of good intention on the part of Ms Hunter and her staff to get this through, but I think it has been very poorly handled and not enough advice has been taken. Even late last week my staff were advising on ways to more efficiently deal with this today—advice, Mr Assistant Speaker, which was not taken—and we would not have taken the best part of an hour and a half to deal with this bill if the advice of my staff had been taken.
The problem is that this has been such a clunky process that I am still not satisfied—and I am still not confident—that what we have is a fully functioning, workable piece of legislation. We really will not know that until it is in and operating. That is because neither of the parties who thought that this was so important would go away and redraft from the start. I advocated from the outset that this bill be redrafted so we could see how it would operate as a whole. It is very important work. It is work that deals with tragic circumstances of our nearest and dearest. If this does not work or there are major drafting problems, it will be another tragedy and it will make the lives of the people who have lost their children that much more difficult.
I am putting on the record that, while I support the notion of this bill, I think that it has been very badly handled. I think it has been very badly handled by the minister, who promised amendments months ago. They were very late in coming. I think it has been very badly handled by the minister here today, who persisted in moving amendments, even though she knew not only that they would fail but also that they
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