Page 3039 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video

---

about to come to an end, and that is at the heart of the mess that we have to fix. We have to fix this minister’s mess again. It means making a bad scheme a little better and it means helping industry through a difficult time. That is the responsible thing to do.

The irresponsible thing to do is what Mr Corbell is doing: firstly, to assure industry that you are going to smooth the transition and then not do it; and then, when you stuff it up and when you kill it in the dead of night, it is to do nothing. That is irresponsible. And we, as legislators, have a responsibility to take action in those circumstances. It is a scheme that this government put in place, it is a scheme that this government mismanaged and it is a scheme that if not remedied would hurt this industry and would unreasonably affect people in this transition.

Far from acting responsibly, Mr Corbell has not. And that is why it is really important that we do fix this up. What Mr Corbell did in the lead-up was to give assurances that things would be okay. They were not. What we need to do is actually provide the transition that Mr Corbell failed to provide.

MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.51): I would like to briefly comment. The Greens will be supporting Mr Corbell’s amendment. I think it is broadly similar to that which Mr Seselja had in mind, with some subtle differences. The principle of either amendment is quite the essence of the matter, which is really to improve the reporting requirements. As I touched on earlier, I think that in some ways probably the government was caught out by surprise by the speed with which the first part of the cap was taken up. I think it is understandable in some ways, given the external factors, that they did get caught out to an extent there, but I think that points us to a need to learn from that and to put in place more rigorous reporting requirements, more regular reporting requirements and more publicly transparent reporting requirements so that both the minister or the department and the general community have a clearer sense of what is happening and therefore what we might anticipate is coming in the future. So the Greens will be supporting this amendment.

Proposed new clause 5A agreed to.

Remainder of bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.

Question put:

That the bill, as amended, be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the affirmative.

---

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video