Page 1555 - Week 05 - Thursday, 15 May 2014
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The bill also makes all officers of the Assembly accountable to the Assembly for part 2, budget management, part 3, financial reports, part 4, financial management responsibilities, and part 5, banking and investment under the Financial Management Act 1996.
Finally, and again for all officers of the Assembly, the bill provides a process for Treasurer’s advances made through the Speaker, in consultation with the relevant committee.
I thank the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, chaired by my colleague Mr Smyth, as well as the Clerk of the Assembly, for discovering this inconsistency, and Madam Speaker for bringing the matter to the attention of the Chief Minister. The Chief Minister referred the issue to Mr Rattenbury, who introduced the bill in 2013, to give him the opportunity to have this bill drafted.
The new arrangements will provide a consistency of approach for the independent agencies covered under the legislation, and will give those agencies more independence from the government and its executive, reporting directly to the Assembly.
But I note that there is more. Mr Rattenbury intends to introduce yet another amendment to clarify the process contemplated in the bill relating to the Treasurer’s advances. I am not certain why this relatively simple bill could not achieve all it set out to achieve. Indeed, if Mr Rattenbury had given enough attention to detail when preparing his 2013 bill, the bill before us today would perhaps not have been necessary. So the amendments, in a sense, are a fix-up to a fix-up.
Nevertheless, I am grateful this issue has been discovered now, rather than was the case with the 2013 legislation—after it has been passed into law. We will support the amendments.
It does beg the question about the Greens’ seemingly endless capacity not to get their legislation right. I have raised issues before about the problem with this executive member’s legislation. I hope that we do not see similar instances where we are repeatedly providing fix-ups to sloppy work in Mr Rattenbury’s office.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Regional Development, Minister for Health and Minister for Higher Education) (11.01): In May 2012 the Assembly passed the Legislative Assembly (Office of the Legislative Assembly) Act, providing statutory recognition of the distinct role that the Clerk and the secretariat play in the management of the Assembly.
The 2012 act set the precedents for expressing in legislation the separation of the Legislative Assembly from the executive and the wider ACT public service. The Officers of the Assembly Legislation Amendment Bill that was passed last year, and which will commence on 1 July 2014, established the Auditor-General, the Electoral Commission and Ombudsman as officers of the Assembly. This arrangement will see the officers’ independence from the executive and their relationship with the Assembly set out in law.
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