Page 2317 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
When you contemplate what we see now - our buildings, our transport, our lifestyle - everything we do could be completely different in 30 years' time. In addition, we could have many options open to us. The whole world will be a different place. We will probably become even more a part of the world community, which in turn will present challenges never thought of.
As I said earlier, it is an intriguing subject. However, I believe that this is a subject for academics to ponder and postulate on. Let us see how we are going to handle the next five years, or even just the next year, and when we have those answers maybe we can look further. If we lived under a dictatorship, there could be a lot of predictability about the future, but then we would forgo our greatest possession, our freedom. We need only to read through this latest report to see that its lack of substance and its floundering, bear out my point that this whole exercise is just a bit of indulgence and a distraction from tackling the great and pressing problems of today. The unemployed do not want to know about 30 years down the road. They are thinking about tomorrow. I would be very interested to know about the cost of the 2020 study and how that money could be better spent on employment.
This Government loves to get involved in reports because it sounds like they are really doing something, but I would like to predict that in two or three years from now this report will all sound rather irrelevant. Then again, we could always conduct another study to analyse the comparison between what was predicted and what actually happened, to work out the shortcomings of the exercise. This is a cynical response to the report, but if I believed that the Government had some grasp of the present I might be more inclined to respond more positively, or at least be more tolerant of its prognostications.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
INTERPRETATION (AMENDMENT) BILL (NO. 2) 1993
[COGNATE BILL:
ACTS REVISION (POSITION OF CROWN) BILL 1993]
Debate resumed from 17 June 1993, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MADAM SPEAKER: Is it the wish of the Assembly to debate this order of the day concurrently with the Acts Revision (Position of Crown) Bill 1993? There being no objection, that course will be followed. I remind members that, in debating the Interpretation (Amendment) Bill (No. 2), they may also address their remarks to the Acts Revision (Position of Crown) Bill.
MR HUMPHRIES (9.09): Madam Speaker, these two Bills deal with the position of the Crown. Let us be clear at the outset that we mean here by the Crown not any notion to do with the monarchy so much as the Executive, in this case the ACT Executive. This is an issue of the liability of the ACT Executive within the operation of ACT laws. It also to some extent touches on the question of the liability of the Commonwealth Executive and the Executives of other State governments and the Northern Territory Government.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .