Page 3896 - Week 10 - Thursday, 20 September 2018
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Amendment agreed to.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.30): I want to comment briefly on the comments made by Mr Rattenbury. I think that there is furious agreement that there should be more reference of legislation to a committee for inquiry and report. I sound a bit like a cracked record. This is the practice in New Zealand and Queensland. I think in New Zealand the standard minimum time for referral is five or six weeks and in Queensland the standard minimum time is eight weeks.
I agree with Mr Rattenbury that we do need to be more agile in this space, but at the same time we have to balance that with giving members of the community an opportunity to submit to these inquiries. The Canberra Liberals’ concern with this is that six weeks, the last of which is a sitting week, does not give the community the opportunity that it needs to participate in such an inquiry.
Original question, as amended, resolved in the affirmative.
Statute Law Amendment Bill 2018
Mr Ramsay, pursuant to notice, presented the bill, its explanatory statement and a Human Rights Act compatibility statement.
Title read by Clerk.
MR RAMSAY (Ginninderra—Attorney-General, Minister for the Arts and Cultural Events, Minister for Building Quality Improvement, Minister for Business and Regulatory Services and Minister for Seniors and Veterans) (11.32): I move:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
The Statute Law Amendment Bill 2018 makes statute law revision amendments to the ACT legislation under guidelines for the technical amendments program approved by the government. The program provides for amendments that are minor or technical and non-controversial. They are generally insufficiently important to justify the presentation of separate legislation in each case and are inappropriate to make as editorial amendments in the process of republishing legislation under the Legislation Act 2001.
Statute law amendment bills serve the important purpose of improving the overall quality of the ACT statute book so that our laws are kept up to date and are easier to find, read and understand. A well-maintained statute book greatly enhances access to ACT legislation and is a very practical measure to give effect to the principle that members of the community have a right to know the laws that affect them.
The bill contains a number of minor amendments with detailed explanatory notes, so it is certainly not useful for me to go through them all. Schedule 3, for example, contains a list of spelling and syntax corrections and, while they are important, I will certainly not be detailing each one. However, I will take the opportunity to briefly
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