Page 3532 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 12 September 2017
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minor or technical amendments to a range of territory legislation, while conserving resources that would otherwise be needed if the amendments were each dealt with individually.
This particular Statute Law Amendment Bill covers three types of amendments. As has been noted, schedule 1 deals with minor amendments; for example, clarifying which ministers are responsible for a function to ensure that the legislative intent behind a bill is preserved. Schedule 2 deals with structural amendments. Structural amendments are those that deal with how our legislation is organised. For example, these are amendments that affect the kinds of laws and instruments that the Assembly and the executive can make and the process by which they are made. And, as has been noted, schedule 3 includes technical amendments. These are things like improving grammar or correcting typos.
Each individual amendment in this bill is minor, but the process of improving the operation of our statute book is important. Government works more efficiently and the law is less prone to dispute as a result of this series of bills. Some examples from each of the schedules in this bill, as have already been spoken to, continue to highlight the value of this bill.
Briefly, the bill, in schedule 1, amends the Annual Reports (Government Agencies) Act 2004 to correct an oversight by inserting new section 9A in part 3 to provide that the Chief Minister is the responsible minister for a state of the service report. This simply clarifies the roles of ministers with regard to annual reports.
The City Renewal Authority and Suburban Land Agency Act 2017 is amended to omit references to “minister” and substitute them with references to “Treasurer” in section 63. This means that the Treasurer will have the power to make directions in relation to land acquisition by the City Renewal Authority or the Suburban Land Agency. The power to make those directions is consistent with the Treasurer’s responsibilities under the act, sections 9 and 39, in relation to financial matters of an authority or an agency.
The Residential Tenancies Act 1997, section 11B, as has been noted, is amended in relation to the installation of smoke alarms to clarify a reference. The intention of section 11B when it was included in the act was to allow lessors to install a hardwired or a battery-operated smoke alarm that meets the relevant Australian standard for smoke alarms. As has been pointed out, this may be a technical and non-controversial amendment but, as Ms Cheyne has made particularly clear, these alarms certainly have significance in the way that people live and in the quality and the safety of people’s lives.
The way that section 11B referenced the building code did create uncertainty. It had the unintended consequence of appearing to require lessors of existing buildings to install a hardwired alarm rather than having the choice of installing a hardwired or a battery-operated alarm, and this was never the intention behind the legislation. This bill resolves the uncertainty by revising section 11B to provide for requirements in relation to smoke alarms to be specified by regulation.
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