Page 2399 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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responsible for the Bill. Now, it seems to me that additional reporting requirements necessarily involve some additional expenditure of moneys in the Territory, since these were above and beyond what was already agreed to in the Bill as it was presented. The consequence of that clearly must be, if the interpretation that the legislative counsel has provided is correct, that in some way that amendment was ultra vires.
Obviously, I will not press that point, but I do think this whole question needs further examination and I would also say that we cannot assume that the Assembly could operate efficiently on the basis that Bills of this kind could not be amended. It would be a very sad day if we were not able to address all the issues properly in this place because of some legal obstacle to doing that. So I hope that we can overcome this problem by looking at this issue, perhaps initially in the scrutiny of Bills committee chaired by Ms Maher. At this stage I certainly indicate that I am not pleased with that interpretation and hope that it does not stand in that form.
MR STEVENSON (12.22): The removal of this clause no longer requires the amendment that I had drafted, which was to do with the reporting requirements for consultancies. The reporting requirements that we are now going to remove - perhaps not necessarily at this time - and introduced into the Bill by the Chief Minister, required the details of the name of the consultant and the period of his or her engagement, and that basically is all. I do not and did not see that as being anything like the accountability necessary in this or any other assembly.
My amendment would have achieved additional information that actually meant something. It would have included the total amount paid to the consultant under each agreement under which the consultant was engaged. It would have included an estimate of the proportion of that amount attributable to each task the consultant was engaged to perform and also the reports prepared by the consultant in respect of each task - just the headings of them - that the consultant was engaged to perform.
I was the one who wanted some accountability in the area of consultants. An original amendment that I put forward some three months ago would have introduced the situation whereby the final approval on the use of consultants would have been given, not by the Chief Minister alone, but by this Assembly as a whole. I felt that was important. We all understand that on the hill there have been investigations, and there are others going on around Australia at the moment, into the use of consultants by governments. I think there should be full accountability in this matter.
The attempt by the Chief Minister a short while ago to turn the suggestion that I brought up on the desirability of accountability to the suggestion that there was, perhaps,
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