Page 3635 - Week 08 - Thursday, 19 August 2010
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sources and not be solicited by the registrar or provided by the licensee. Given that regulations cannot be exhaustive in listing all possible ways that the registrar may come by information or what information should be considered, in the government’s view it would be preferable to leave the provisions as they are.
Throughout the CO(L)A act and other legislation there are numerous processes that allow applications from practitioners or other parties to the registrar to make a particular decision or take a course of action. It would make legislation unwieldy to attempt to direct the registrar or other officers on what they must or may have regard to in every decision and to state each time that if an application can be made that the registrar must consider it. This is implicit in the words of the amendment bill. Accordingly, the government does not support the second Greens’ amendment.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.55): The opposition will not be supporting the amendment either. We accept the government’s argument that has been put to us in discussions that this is superfluous. We do not see the need to potentially confuse the issue with these additional words. Therefore, given we accept that, we will not be supporting the amendment.
Amendment negatived.
Bill, as a whole, as amended, agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour.
Sitting suspended from 11.56 am to 2 pm.
Questions without notice
Budget—expenditure blowouts
MR SESELJA: My question is to the Treasurer. Treasurer, the Treasurer’s advance is intended to be utilised when there is an urgent need for funding and insufficient funds are available for the particular area of expenditure. On 24 June 2010, you tabled notices of a number of allocations from the Treasurer’s advance. In your tabling comments, you noted that not all of the funds available for the Treasurer’s advance had been allocated and you said that it “demonstrates the government’s ability to control costs”. Treasurer, it is reported in today’s Canberra Times that “ACT government departments blow budgets by $23 million”. How can a situation where emergency funds are required for unbudgeted spending demonstrate your ability to control costs?
MS GALLAGHER: The reason the government—indeed, all governments in this place—have Treasurer’s advances is to enable them to meet unforeseen and urgent expenditure requirements that could not be reasonably predicted at the time when the budgets were put together. If you look through the items included in the Treasurer’s advance allocation, you will see that many of them are due to increases in activity
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