Common Contracts

Agreement in Principle

November 5th, 2009

• Filed
  November 5th, 2009

Today the Parliament has the chance to correct one of the most ill-conceived and disproportionate legislative errors ever committed by this Parliament. A bizarre alliance of the Liberal-Nationals Coalition, the Greens and the minor parties put through a bill to create a criminal offence for newspapers to republish what was already public. Conceived in desperation, without reflection on its consequences, the Greens-Coalition amendment now has been exposed to the fresh air of public scrutiny. This bill will undo the folly of the 24 June amendment. It will remove subsections (4) and (5) of section 18A of the bill and restore the Act to the position it would have been in had the Greens-Coalition amendment not been moved. Let me be clear: The Greens-Coalition amendment created a criminal offence for a person to publish in a newspaper or other publicly available document any ranking or comparison of particular schools according to school results or anything from which a school can be identif