Page 2103 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 June 2015
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Eight disallowable or notifiable instruments have to be put in place before this bill can come into full operation, none of which are available. This has been being written for the last 12 months and there are still eight disallowable and notifiable instruments that no-one has seen. All that the clubs have asked for over the last couple of years is certainty. There is no certainty in what we do today because it is still at the whim of the minister to decide when phase 1 finishes and phase 2 starts. Until that is in legislation, the clubs will not have any certainty whatsoever. This is a very poor process.
There is poor drafting. The amending bill is about 160 pages; the explanatory statement is 90 pages. If you have to take 90 pages to explain 160 pages of legislation and then expect people to be across it and understand it fully and for it to be easy to operate, you are kidding yourself. What should have happened is a complete rewrite of the bill. In the time they have had, that is what should have happened. Instead, we have got this bill. We had a dixer at question time about reducing red tape. This adds an extra 44 pages to the legislation. It goes up. That is not red tape reduction. And that is before we get the notifiable and disallowable instruments. This is an incredibly poor process. It is an incredibly poor outcome, and with that in mind we will not support the bill today because it would be wrong to do so.
It would be wrong to support this because, as with so many of the bills that Minister Burch brings to this place, we will be back to fix it because she never gets it right. Never. That is most unfortunate because the industry deserves better. What the government intends to put in place today with the support of the Greens is a convoluted, complex solution to what should be a much simpler process. It does not answer all of the scenarios; for instance, what happens on a greenfield site? Who knows? We will find out, maybe, but I bet there will be an amendment to cover it. What it does not deliver is certainty. Read the submissions of the clubs to the public accounts inquiry. Look at what Mr House said. I acknowledge his presence in the gallery today. As a former adviser to a former Treasurer he must be having nightmares reliving this on budget reply day. All the clubs said they wanted was some certainty, and all those opposite are willing to offer them is six months certainty. Six months, and that has only been prompted because I put an amendment, which we will debate later, to try to give certainty.
Let’s face it, our clubs are businesses. Mr Wall has been in business; Mr Coe knows about business. If I said to you, “I’ll give you six months of certainty to plan your business,” can you take that to the bank? Absolutely not. The banks are already wary about our clubs sector because of the lack of certainty this government has injected into the industry. It is this government’s fault—change after change, backflip after backflip, fiasco after fiasco. We only need to recall January where one day the government was gung-ho, the next day the minister was on her own and the third day it had all gone out the door because this government and this minister cannot get it right.
The clubs deserve better and the members of those clubs deserve better and the people who use those clubs deserve better. They are a big sector in this town. They employ a lot of people. They pay a lot of bills. They support a lot of businesses. They pay a lot
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