Page 4698 - Week 12 - Thursday, 1 November 2018
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amendment. We do not believe that it works structurally within this. And it was not about time; it was about the consideration of whether this amendment would work.
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (5.15): Whilst I appreciate Ms Le Couteur’s contribution that her office and my office have worked collaboratively on this—and that has certainly been the case from my perspective—it is a shame that if members of the Labor Party or representatives of the Labor Party have not been as cooperative in this process, they are in effect being rewarded for that and they are getting their preferred outcome because of that inactivity. I think it is most unfortunate that we are not going to get the transparency that the ACT public deserve.
Mr Coe’s amendment to Mr Gentleman’s proposed amendment negatived.
Mr Gentleman’s amendment No 9 agreed to.
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella—Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Minister for Planning and Land Management, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister assisting the Chief Minister on Advanced Technology and Space Industries) (5.16), by leave: I move amendments Nos 10 to 14 circulated in my name together [see schedule 1 at page 4715].
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (5.17): The opposition will be supporting government amendments 10 through 14. These amendments give effect to the matters covered in clauses 8, 10 and 11 of the bill. The changes are largely the result of negotiations and to alleviate any concerns surrounding the administrative burden of reporting on the matters in this bill.
The bill itself was not meant to be administratively burdensome, but instead required reporting on the due diligence that had already been undertaken by public servants before an acquisition was approved. That is, if the government was going to be spending half a million dollars, one million dollars, 1½ million dollars or whatever the amount is, surely they have already done the due diligence, and filling out a one-pager on the work they had already done should not be particularly troublesome.
I know that the amendments now specify that the requirement is simply a short statement about matters identified in the bill. We believe that this should be relatively easy to comply with if it is simply a high-level discussion or a few paragraphs copied from the briefing document that has already been prepared. We believe that it is sufficient for the time being. It is not our intention to create an undue burden on the public service, but we maintain that there is merit in consolidated and consistent reporting on acquisitions across agencies.
At the moment we have just about no visibility on the vast majority of government land acquisitions, particularly those in Housing ACT. This will at least give us a glimpse of the purchases—
Ms Berry: No, you should not. It is none of your business.
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