Page 2956 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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The Associations Incorporations Act does not currently include a mechanism to prevent associations that incorporate and continually fail to meet their obligations under the act from reincorporating. In this regard, the act is failing to prevent people from taking advantage of their members, and in turn, the community.
The amendments to the Associations Incorporations Act will allow the Registrar-General to apply to ACAT to order that a person not act in the role of public officer or committee member of an association. The ACAT may make a disqualification order in the event of failure by the person, or an association of which the person was the public officer or a committee member, to meet their statutory obligations.
The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act sets out the circumstances in which one parent may apply to the Registrar-General to change a child’s name. Currently, the act sets out a power of the Registrar-General to correct the register when satisfied that, in view of the order of a court, an entry in the register is incorrect. The act defines “court” to include any court of the territory, the commonwealth or a state.
However, another section of the act vests power in the Supreme Court to make orders to add or omit information about a child’s parentage, which could be interpreted to mean that the Registrar-General’s correction power does not extend to correcting errors relating to the parentage of a child. This interpretation effectively requires a person wanting to change parentage information to get a Supreme Court order, even though they may already have an order from another court such as the Family Court.
To remove any doubt, the amendments will allow a parent to change their child’s name if the child’s name has been changed under the law of the commonwealth, a corresponding law, or by order of any court in Australia.
The Land Titles (Unit Titles) Act currently contains sizing and dimension requirements for units plans documents that cause unnecessary “red tape”—for example, it is approximately double the cost for obtaining the sheets in the required B4 size and the specified margin dimensions, rather than using an A3 size sheet.
The amendments will remove the current formatting requirements relating to units plans documents, and replace them with a generic provision to the effect that these documents must be in a format approved by the Registrar-General. The approved format will be a notifiable instrument, available on the legislation register.
The bill also includes amendments to the Victims of Crime (Financial Assistance) Act 1983 to give effect to amendments made via the JACS Act 2008 (No 2), to give victims of culpable driving access to financial assistance under the scheme. The Victims of Crime (Financial Assistance) Act 1983 still includes a legislative impediment to payments of financial assistance to victims of culpable driving offences, including to relatives such as siblings, which this amendment remedies. Prior to the 2008 amendments, the definition of “violent crime” had inadvertently omitted culpable driving offences under the act. These offences have a strong element of violence, and are included in the list of violent crimes in the act.
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