Page 3895 - Week 10 - Thursday, 20 September 2018

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MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.23): The Canberra Liberals will be opposing Mr Gentleman’s time frame and also Ms Le Couteur’s time frame. However, I can count and I probably will not move the amendment circulated in my name. The Canberra Liberals do believe that the October-November time frame is not sufficient time for the justice and community safety committee to do justice, so to speak, to this inquiry and we believe that there should be more time to do that.

I also have some concerns about the constraints of this inquiry and the extent to which the justice and community safety committee may be constrained by its terms of reference. There is a bit of an out in 1(c), but the clear message from the government is: “We do not want to talk about CTP; we want to talk about the government’s new scheme of CTP and not CTP across the board.” I think that that is something that the people of the ACT should be quite concerned about. The Canberra Liberals will be opposing Ms Le Couteur’s amendment. If that fails, I will move mine.

MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (11.24): I will make a brief reflection on this. I think one of the practices that we do not see in this Assembly very much is committees actually looking at pieces of legislation in the way the federal parliament does and other parliaments tend to do. It has always struck me that we do not do as much of that in this place as we might. And I would love to see more of that.

However, I think if we are going to do that we also need to look at our practices. At the moment every inquiry in this place does require a four or five-month commitment. We cannot do that every time we want to look at a piece of legislation. I think there is actually an interesting discussion for us to have in this place about having committees look at legislation but how we can do it in a timely manner.

It is not realistic to take an exposure draft of legislation and send it for a four or five-month inquiry if we want to actually get on with things in this place. I simply add that observation into this discussion in the sense that I think committees should be able to turn a piece of legislation over in four to six weeks. I am not sure what the time frame is, but I think that is a practice that we need to develop here if we want to look at legislation more.

Question put:

That the amendment be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

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