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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4683 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Mr Speaker, can I just say in relation to this matter, though, that a little history does not go astray. The reason that the Greens originally proposed this and we and the Independents agreed to support this was that we were getting somewhat tired of coming into this place with wafer-thin Executive business papers from the Government. We would come in here and it would be home time at 4 o'clock because the Government had so little Executive business. Meanwhile, private members business was banking up on the notice paper, because we had only a couple of hours in the morning - effectively 11/2 to two hours in the morning - to deal with it, and we were going home early in the afternoons because the Government could not fill their notice paper up. It seems to me that we made the right decision to say, "We have business that we want to do, even if the Government does not have business it wants to do. We will support the extension of private members business".

I know Mr Humphries is now a bit sensitive about this, because he is the Manager of Government Business. Unfortunately, he has been mismanaging Government business. We get to the end of the session and suddenly they are rushing all this legislation in. The legislation is so badly drafted that the day before it is due to be debated they then rush in again with five, 10 or 20 pages of amendments to their own legislation and expect us to rush these things through the parliament. I can understand that he is a bit sensitive about the amount of Executive business because he has a lot to get through; but, quite frankly, that is not our problem. It is up to the Government to manage their business in a way that ensures it can be done. We have said that we are happy to consider extra days, if extra days are necessary to deal with Government business. We would have considered an extra day to debate the budget, rather than going along with the Government's agenda of introducing the debate on the Appropriation Bill at 10 o'clock at night.

Mr Speaker, just on that point, I should say that, in the week that the Appropriation Bill was debated, the Opposition and the Greens and Independents did, in fact, agree to give over Wednesday afternoon to Executive business to assist the Government in getting through their business paper. As I said, it could be argued that it was the Government's mismanagement which led them to having so much legislation to get through in that week.

Mr Humphries: We allowed the Greens' motion to come up and take up the whole of the Tuesday. That was mismanagement, was it?

MR WHITECROSS: Yes; we allowed the Greens' motion to come up on Tuesday, Mr Humphries; and then on Wednesday we gave you the whole afternoon to discuss Executive business.

Mr Humphries: Yes, but we spent 10 hours on the Tuesday debating the Greens' motion.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Humphries has an elastic view of time; we spent 10 hours on Tuesday debating the Greens' motion. Deary, deary me, Mr Humphries! The reason why we went all night on Thursday was that, from day one, the day they set down Executive business for Thursday at the Government business meeting the week before,

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