Page 1753 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009

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This motion includes a small omnibus of what I consider minor and technical changes to the standing orders. These have all been discussed in the administration and procedure committee over a period of some weeks now and consultation has been undertaken with all the parties. These are largely of a nature to simply clarify some matters in the standing orders. I will, for the purpose of Hansard, speak briefly to each of them.

The first is to omit the term “owners” from the Speaker’s acknowledgement of the traditional inhabitants of this area and insert the word “custodians”. This is based on advice we have received from the Office of Multicultural Affairs who did advise that a better term would be “custodians”. So we are moving to amend that standing order.

The second matter relates to clarifying what amendments can be made by the Clerk. There was some uncertainty after an amendment to standing orders completed in March 2008 and, on advice of the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, there are amendments proposed here which will simply ensure that there is absolute clarity that, when the Clerk makes changes to a piece of legislation or a bill that has been passed, the Clerk has the correct remit and authority to make those minor changes, such as correcting the numbers of sections, correcting small errors in the title and those sorts of matters.

The issue with standing order 74 relates to the status of items of business adjourned prior to question time. Again, there was some ambiguity in the existing standing order and we simply seek to remove that ambiguity in the proposed change to standing order 74.

Finally, in regard to standing order 125A, the removal of private members’ business orders of the day from the notice paper, this amendment simply seeks to put a time limit on how long an item will remain on the notice paper so that over the course of time we do not end up with an extremely long list and we have more of a current list. By keeping a current list going over a period of time it will also cut down on the number of pages that need to be printed. Members will be given notification before an item is removed—and I think that is important—so that, if members want to have an item retained on the paper, they have an opportunity to reintroduce it if they so wish.

Those are the purposes of the standing order changes.

MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.34): The government will be supporting these amendments. As Mr Rattenbury has indicated, they are amendments which provide for clarification of a range of matters in terms of the operation of the existing standing orders.

We acknowledge the advice Mr Rattenbury is providing in relation to reference to the traditional inhabitants as custodians rather than owners. And that is supported, based on this advice. In relation to the matters concerning removal of private members’ business, the government notes that this is the practice to date in the Assembly and this allows for, I guess, confirmation of that practice, which has been in place for


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