Page 5054 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010

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That said, as worthy as these policy goals are, they do come with a cost. And we are saying that the government should be forced to set out to the community how much those costs will be, that they should be forced to set out the road map, how they are going to get there. That is why we believe that this amendment is important and I commend the amendment to the Assembly.

MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (4.15): The government will not be supporting this amendment, on the same terms as the government has not supported other similar amendments proposed by Mr Seselja during this debate. And that is primarily about the appropriateness of where these types of expectations about cost-benefit analysis and analysis more generally should sit.

Our view is that they should not sit in the legislation itself. Details, costs and implementation will form a part of action plan 2. The government has made it very clear that its policy document actions to implement and to start working towards the first of these targets will be outlined in action plan 2 and that action plan 2 will detail the measures the government proposes to implement and the costs and benefits of doing so.

So that is the way we believe these matters should be managed. It is not necessary for this level of detail to be provided for in the bill. Indeed it is most unusual to have this level of detail in the bill. Whilst I appreciate that the opposition wish to make a political point, the government does not agree that this is the appropriate place for these measures. But that does not in any way diminish the government’s commitment to appropriately outlining the detail of the costs and benefits of various measures it proposes.

MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.17): The Greens will not be supporting these amendments today. While we have sympathy with the intent of these clauses, we are unable to support them because we have real concerns about how they will work and their lack of proportionality.

I think it is a very real concern for the public to be able to see what the government’s actions will be and how much government programs and policies will cost. And this is information that the Greens also think it is important to have a level of debate about. But the problem with both these amendments is that they place a statutory demand on the government, yet they are not specific about exactly what is required. Let me take each of them in turn.

Proposed section 20A essentially requires the government to prepare a detailed report on what it is going to cost to meet these targets before the act commences, more or less—by 30 April 2011. I suppose it is saying that we want to know right at the beginning what it is going to cost to achieve this. This misses the point of the bill, and I made this point earlier in debate. The bill sets a policy direction; it does not set out the mechanisms of how we are going to get there. And it is almost impossible, and certainly close to meaningless, to cost a policy direction without having selected all of the mechanisms.


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