Page 678 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 July 1989
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finalised form instead of talking around it and then perhaps around an amendment to it, which some have read and some have not read. Let us get this as quickly as possible to a select committee and get it to report back to this Assembly.
MR STEFANIAK (11.24): Mr Speaker, I do not propose to go into the details of the Bill or the need for it; I think those views are fairly well known. Suffice to say that Mr Collaery's motion is before the Assembly to refer this Bill to a committee. I am somewhat amazed - because I have always been prepared to have this matter debated - that the Government is now seeking to stifle this.
It was the Government that was very keen on more consultation and more time, and encouraged the members of the opposition to have just that. Now it seems that it does not want this matter to go to a committee. I wonder whether the Government simply wants this Bill to be totally swept under the carpet and forgotten. My views are well known, and the views of the Chief Minister are very well known there.
As other speakers in favour of this reference to a select committee have said, this will enable consultation - consultation that some groups in the community have said they have not had. Mr Humphries has indicated to this Assembly the amount of consultation that the Liberal Party has had in relation to this and other law and order matters over the last 12 months.
But other groups want consultation. Mr Collaery was very keen to establish such a committee so that there could be further consultation, and we support him in that because that seemed to be the will of this Assembly, although now it seems that the Government wants something quite different again.
The motion is that the committee report by 25 July 1989. I note Mr Wood's comments. I note the Chief Minister's comments, too - she referred to it as a simplistic Bill. It is not a very long Bill. The Occupational Health and Safety Bill, which is a long Bill - some 50-odd pages - initially had only 28 days to be considered. That will come before the house tomorrow, admittedly about eight days after the 28 days were up, but still within a short period, and that was a very complex and very detailed Bill. The Chief Minister has also indicated that she wants to refer a broad range of issues to an existing committee, and they are a broad range of issues, quite different really from what we are proposing here.
We are looking at a specific piece of legislation to deal with a problem and provide some legal remedies for that problem. The Chief Minister has raised a large number of problems that she wishes a committee to discuss. It is a very broad range of problems. They are two completely different things that we are talking about here. What she
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