Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues) Share this | Hansard source

The government will not be accepting the amendment proposed by the member for Jagajaga. The opposition’s amendment to schedule 2, item 10 would fail to release the burdensome requirement on the department to update the regulations every time a new version of an instrument or other writing, as referred to in proposed new subsection 48(2), was made. This would have no impact on parliamentary scrutiny.

I will try to make this as simple as possible by providing an example. At the moment the only document referred to in the current student assistance regulations is the guide to Australian government payments, as in force at September 2004—a guide put out by Centrelink quarterly. At the moment the regulations do not in fact point to the current operative guide. The current operative guide is dated from 1 January 2006 to 19 March 2006. The fact that the regulations refer to an out-of-date guide does not have any effect on the application of the current version of the guide, but Labor’s amendment would still require the department to amend the regulations each time the version changed. As you can see, this does not always happen promptly. The result is that the regulations can provide misleading information to the public. The government’s proposed subsection 48(2) will mean that this should not occur in the future.

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