Page 4583 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
PERSONAL EXPLANATION
MS FOLLETT (Leader of the Opposition): Mr Speaker, I seek your leave to make a short personal statement.
MR SPEAKER: Do you claim to have been misrepresented?
MS FOLLETT: I do. In his response to, I think, the question from Mr Stefaniak relating to reported comments by me on the front page of the Canberra Times, Mr Kaine accused me of having said that the senior bureaucrats in the ACT were less than professional and, again, he accused me later on of slurring them and saying that the senior bureaucrats were incompetent and unprofessional. Mr Speaker, in fact, that is a total misrepresentation of what I said. What I said was that it is this Government which is incompetent and unprofessional to the extent that its members have, in fact, no real agenda for the ACT at all. They are being run by the bureaucrats and they are so obsessed with their own internal difficulties that that situation is unlikely to change.
LEGAL ADVICE ON PRIVATE MEMBERS' BILLS
Standing Orders 200 and 201
MR BERRY, by leave: I move:
That the Assembly calls for the provision of all legal advice in respect of Private Members' Bills to be available for consideration by the Assembly on 11 December 1990.
This issue, of course, is an important one for the carriage of private members' Bills through this Assembly, and there has been much debate on the issue. Of course, there have been some concerns about the delays to consideration of private members' Bills that might be caused as a result of pursuing the legal advice and, if the Government is a little slow off the mark in that respect, then the delays could be quite a bit longer. But the issue really is about getting the matter resolved quickly in order that private members' Bills can be put before this place with all haste.
I think already there has been some critical comment in the community about the Government's position in relation to this. I do not think it serves the interests of the Territory well at all if that concern in the community is allowed to persist while legal advice is being sought, particularly if the seeking of that legal advice is a drawn out affair and is seen then to be a delaying tactic from the Government's point of view. So all this motion seeks to do is to move the matter along and get the matter back before the Assembly in order that we can get on with the business of presenting private members' Bills to this place in accordance with the wishes of private members, and to see that the initiative of private members is not stifled in any way by an interpretation from the other side.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .