Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I think enough of the Senate’s time has been wasted this afternoon by the spurious censure motion against the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, so allow me to be brief but also to inject some reality and fact, as opposed to the hyperbole we have just heard. The simple fact is that the Australian people, in voting for the Constitution, clothed the Commonwealth with a power to make laws in relation to the territories. I invite honourable senators to check out section 122 of the Constitution. Following on from that, the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988, the self-government act, entrenches the Commonwealth’s constitutional power to disallow ACT law through the Governor-General.

I might just ask, rhetorically: who was in power in 1988? I think it was Labor legislation. The Labor Party itself thought it appropriate that laws made by the ACT should be disallowable through the Governor-General. We have the situation once again where the Labor Party—for opposition’s sake; I do not know why—is willing to do a backflip on its previous principles and is willing to engage in what would be quite a fatuous discussion and investigation. The self-government act provides a simpler method of removing a law than the method suggested by the Greens which would require the making of other laws to override an unacceptable law. What currently exists is that the—