Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2010 – Second Reading Speech

There are a number of measures in the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2010, including one from the 2010-11 budget. I will not go over them, given the time, but I do want to indicate that to keep this bill moving we will make some minor amendments. We will withdraw from the bill the two schedules relating to the Indigenous Land Corporation and the scheduling of land. The measure would have amended the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005 to enable the Indigenous Land Corporation to support native title settlement. As the measure has been referred to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, and that will not report until the 2011 autumn sittings, we need to defer this measure from this bill to allow the other measures in the bill to proceed. There are issues around the scheduling of land measure. Once again, rather than holding up the more time critical measures in the bill, this measure is being withdrawn to allow the land area measurement in question to be clarified. Once it has been clarified, the scheduling of land measure will be reintroduced separately.