Page 4797 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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Mr Ramsay say that the only people who do not seem to be happy with this bill are developers and the Canberra Liberals.
Is that really the point we have arrived at? Is this really going to become like, dare I say it, any legislation around climate change in that the way that that works these days is that anyone who dares to question any detail of any climate change legislation is instantly branded as a climate change denier.
Where we have arrived in this space is that according to the government anybody who dares to question this hurriedly prepared legislation will be branded by Mr Ramsay and Mr Gentleman as a building quality denier. It disappoints me that Mr Ramsay is not here to debate this bill. I understand that he is flying to Adelaide for a dinner tonight ahead of an attorneys-general get-together. With the first official meeting of the attorneys-general get-together being at 8.30 tomorrow morning and with this bill being so important in this space I would have expected the minister to be here. I note there are eight flights still to fly to Adelaide after 5 o’clock tonight.
I question if this debate is going to roll on this way, that if anyone dares to question any aspect of this bill then they are dismissed either as dodgy developers or dodgy developers’ mates. I would say specifically to Minister Ramsay that I thought that he was better than that. This is a vastly important and extremely complex policy area and we have to get this right.
When you have drafted a war-and-peace-style amendment bill—most of which is great but which has dozens of moving parts—without any consultation with industry—none—and when you have just knuckled down and done it without speaking to those who ultimately must fix the problem, it is no surprise that you are likely to get some of it wrong.
There are some mistakes, there are some flaws. I intend to call for this debate to be adjourned because we cannot possibly properly debate this bill in the way a parliament would be expected to debate it. We have not had the time to properly examine it.
The bill was referred to committee for inquiry at the last sitting. The committee did not have sufficient time to properly inquire into the bill: no time for hearings, just blast out a call for submissions, read them as quickly as you can and then report. Some of those who provided submissions made the point that they did not have time to respond properly to the entire bill so they chose to focus on some small aspects of it.
We in the Canberra Liberals respected that committee process; we did not pre-empt the findings of that committee inquiry. We allowed it to run its course and it seemed inappropriate for us to draft amendments while the inquiry was in motion. The committee report raises enormous concerns with some aspects of the bill. The committee report was tabled only on Tuesday. The government response was tabled this morning, like five hours ago. Five hours ago was the public tabling of the government’s response.
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