Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I thank the member for Murchison for proposing that we adjourn the debate. Obviously, I will not speak for too long on this question either, but the arguments have been laid out. What we are contemplating here is legally questionable given there are matters before the Supreme Court. What we are seeing here, which the government does not properly acknowledge, is that there is a real level of concern in the Chamber about this legislation and the arguments that have been made to support it.
You might expect – it is one thing for a green MOC to get up and rail to prevent this legislation, knowing that it is part of what would be a desecration of pilitika/Robbins Island, but it is quite another when sometimes more moderate and reasonable voices than mine are expressing very similar concerns. It is regrettable that there does not seem to be a mood more broadly in the Chamber to make sure we get this right, to make sure that we are not being led into interfering in a judicial process.
We still have not seen a foundational argument put by government for this legislation and, in fact, they had to resort to comic caricatures of fictitious characters on the coast who might be affected because it is all part of what has become a bogeyman campaign. It is a bogeyman campaign though, is it not? Creating this sort of scare campaign around structures on the coast that have existed since the State Coastal Policy was enacted in 1996 without a single legal question being asked.
I do not think we should buy the arguments that should this bill pass, it will not cut the sand out from underneath the local community who has taken the matter to the Supreme Court. Of course, because we do not have the time through a committee process, for example, to bring representatives of that local community in and other legal experts, we cannot exactly examine the question of whether or not the passage of this bill would remove a foundational premise for the judicial review launched by the local community group.
I hope members understand that, if they could not support a referral to a committee -because there is an uncertain end date there unless we established a date and reported to it – to adjourn the debate until there has been a proper examination of the matters before the Supreme Court is the appropriate and responsible thing to do in response to this odious bill.
