Ms BURNET (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I am very pleased that Mr Bayley has brought this motion for further consideration, because we have an order in front of us, and we don’t get too many orders before the House, and certainly not as complex as this.
Probably the last most complex order was the Gunns Pulp Mill-enabling legislation, which was some time ago. There will be members of the House who would have been here for that, but many of us were not. This was a divisive, equally as corrupted process, which enabled Liberal and Labor to be in lockstep, and it overrode the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC) at the time.
It was rammed through the Assembly with minimal time for scrutiny, and, sadly, we don’t learn from those lessons. It is so important. Our role in this House to scrutinise anything that comes before us. Why is Labor – and the Liberal Party, the government – so averse to scrutiny? That’s the question. What has Labor got to be concerned about?
There are, as Mr Bayley rightly said, 157 pages of this order. That’s 157 pages of complex planning, essentially a development application. There hasn’t been the scrutiny with this because it has come after the TPC process and the integrated assessment report. Who better to scrutinise it than this parliament before it is made an order? At every step, we should be using our capacity to look at things carefully. But that is not what we are seeing. This is an order that doesn’t get the scrutiny. Therefore, I urge the opposition and members of the government to consider what we’re asking for here. We want scrutiny. This deserves scrutiny. So why on earth would you deny that?
