Page 1814 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 June 2014
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government made three significant changes which were all within the scope of the committee—a trial on cycle path separation or segregation, the introduction of aggravated offences for road traffic offences and a discussion on and implementation of no-fault legislation with regard to insurance.
I think we should be very careful about implementing these sorts of issues when a live committee inquiry is looking into these issues. The government owes it to the committee process to wait to hear what the committee does in fact recommend and what it does in fact report. Otherwise we will have a tough time getting witnesses to submit documents in future, if it turns out that the committee reports are in fact going to be overlooked and the government goes ahead with what it intended to do the whole time.
I pass on that note of concern. That said, I do encourage the government to carefully consider the 28 recommendations and all the commentary in the report so that they can better understand the best practice that the committee has sought to establish by way of improving the roads in the ACT.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo—Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Housing, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for Ageing) (10.13): I wish to speak briefly to this motion this morning.
I would like to thank all of the committee members for their work on the report. Obviously, I have only just seen it, but I can see that a substantial amount of work has gone into it. When I moved the motion to initiate this inquiry in April 2013, I hoped that we would see a thorough canvassing of the issues, and I think we have seen that. There has been a high level of interest in the committee. There were 54 submissions and many witnesses appeared. Certainly, from a first glance at the report, it appears that the committee has canvassed a broad range of issues. Having listened to Mr Gentleman’s summary of the recommendations and having had a quick look myself, there are some really interesting issues here that we will now need to spend more time on.
There will, of course, be a formal government response. I do not seek to pre-empt that in any way. I simply want to thank the committee for their work. Some of the recommendations, I think, will be readily accepted. Others will require some more work, and that will require more detail.
I do reflect on the comments Mr Coe just made about certain initiatives being taken in advance of the committee reporting. We had this discussion in the committee. I do not see this as an issue. Certainly, for example, with the trial of separators in a handful of locations across the city, in my evidence to the committee I said I felt that this was complementary to the work of the committee, in the sense that it is on a pretty small scale. It involves a handful of sites. In some ways it was about further informing the work that the committee was doing. I see there is a recommendation to report on the evaluation of that, and I think that is quite appropriate.
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