Clendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1906. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take the opportunity to respond to this motion. I understand that it is only our new Standing Orders that actually enable this process to go ahead. I think there is a general consensus around the House that none of us want to spend time unnecessarily in the Chamber debating issues. The use of extended hours and the cognate bills that we have had through the House are all good processes because they do not deny anybody the right to be heard. They are simply efficiency measures and those are good things. In this instance however we oppose this motion for the very clear reason that there is a substantive issue at stake here.  
This bill—the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (2012 Expiry and Application Dates) Amendment Bill which has had its first reading tonight—is a very short bill but it does some quite significant things. The bill was tabled as I understand on 2 April about a month ago. For 3 of those 4 weeks of course this House has been in adjournment. I happened to be at a meeting at lunchtime. It was a gathering of NGOs civil societies people representing Government agencies and members of the public all of them with a significant interest in corrections and human rights among other things but specifically corrections. I mentioned this bill in passing to that group. None of them was aware that it was being debated in the House tonight which is an indicator to me. Clearly we want to engage with the public. I am not suggesting for a moment that any party in the House does not believe in the importance of public engagement or civil engagement in the business in the bills going through. In this instance it will come as a complete surprise to people with a vital interest in issues around prisoners’ rights around victims’ rights and about the way we manage our corrections sector; it will be a surprise to those people that this bill is to be debated and that they have until 11 June—that is about 6 weeks if that from tonight—to try to get some sort of sensible position to understand what is at stake and to make a point to this bill.  
I might be less concerned about this foreshortened process if I felt that there was to be a comprehensive review but I am not convinced there will be. Already in the regulatory impact statement that accompanies this bill we see reference to the Government’s redirection policy. It is absolutely clear that the Government is set on embedding permanently the legislation that tonight it is seeking to— 
Louise Upston 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I can anticipate the point of order. I was just about to rise to my feet. This is a very narrow debate. It is about the curtailment of the times of sitting or the change around that. We are not debating what is actually in the bill. So the member can continue but he cannot debate the content of the bill. It is about the procedural motion.  
DAVID CLENDON 
: Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker for that guidance. Indeed it is very much about process. It is about the participatory process and it is about basic democratic procedure. We must allow the public NGOs and people with an interest in these matters to participate. After all all of us want the public to participate in parliamentary processes and clearly the select committee process is a primary avenue for people to do that. People need time to prepare their submissions to think about what they want to say to the select committee to gather their information and conceivably to talk to members of Parliament about this process. Truncating this process may be acceptable—and certainly I do not suggest tonight for a moment that the Greens would always oppose a truncated select committee process—but in this instance we do believe that there are issues at stake that the select committee ought to and indeed needs to hear from members of the public. We are very reluctant to see members of the public NGOs and so on denied a reasonable amount of time.  
It may well be in fact that the Justice and Electoral Committee collectively decides that it can progress this bill through the select committee process quite promptly and have it back into the House for a second reading reasonably swiftly. That decision should be made by the committee given an appropriate process within that committee. It should not be made tonight by the will of the Minister or the Government and so we will oppose this motion.