Page 330 - Week 01 - Thursday, 27 February 2014
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There is much more to do; as the statute book grows every time the Assembly sits and passes legislation, it is incumbent upon us to constantly review and make sure that legislation and regulation is still relevant, that it is still doing the job that we want it to do and that it is meeting the needs of the community.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (4.38): I, too, want to highlight the importance of removing unnecessary laws and regulations, and I commend Mrs Jones for raising this MPI today. The need for the ACT Legislative Assembly to concentrate on a limited number of areas but doing them properly cannot be underestimated. I believe we in this place have a role to make sure that what we are doing we are doing thoroughly and with the best interests of the community in mind. Too often we get into a situation whereby we have a scattergun approach with our laws, regulations and local instruments, which are often well intentioned but perhaps not the best thought out, especially in terms of unintended consequences.
Too often, despite the best of intentions, something gets implemented and then gets forgotten about. What tends to happen in that situation is that the good guys comply and the people the legislative instrument was actually targeted to go on doing as they were before. It ends up being a regulator on those doing the right thing rather than a regulator on those doing the wrong thing. That is why we have to be so careful, whenever we put anything at all into the statute book, that we are doing so not only with the best of intentions but also with the knowledge that we will be able to properly implement what we are doing.
It was interesting hearing from Minister Rattenbury about some of the things he thought were appropriate and that somehow putting a tax on people through the carbon tax was consistent with the MPI today. If it is, there is a bit of a worry about his world view, as I have spoken about in this place before.
The other thing that was quite disingenuous was his accusation that we somehow believe in widespread censorship. This is, of course, absolutely wrong. We believe what happened at the Fringe Festival was an inappropriate use of public funds. It is as simple as that. The way in which the minister expended the money was not right, and we will not back down from that position. Quite aside from the artistic merits of what happened on the night or what did not happen on the night, the fact is that the process this minister engaged was not appropriate. We will not for one moment take a backward step in bringing this issue to the attention of the public.
Something I talked about yesterday was the complexity of the territory plan. As it stands at the moment, the territory plan is a largely inaccessible document. I doubt if there are many members of this place who are that familiar with it, mainly because it is pretty hard to be familiar with. I doubt many members have actually seen a printed copy of the territory plan. You can go to a council and print their ordinance and it would be 100 pages and cover the exact same things our plan does in terms of its breadth. Yet somehow, ours is thousands of pages long.
I agree it has the best intentions, but when it is thousands of pages long it is no wonder we have so much cost in trying to submit and assess DAs. Mr Rattenbury said
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