Page 4610 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
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Mr Kaine: Give us a lend of it and I will read it.
MRS GRASSBY: I will. I suggest that you read that. I worry about the leasehold system because I can see where valuable areas and lands that belong to the people in Canberra are being sold to absentee landlords. We all know how absentee landlords are. They are being sold, and not even to somebody who lives in Canberra. I really worry about how this Government is carrying out this leasehold system. Like Mr Moore and like my colleague, Mr Connolly, I feel very worried about this. As I say, I cannot get answers from the Government on this, even though I have put the questions on the notice paper, and nobody else can either. The questions have been asked in the Canberra Times, they have been asked on the Pru Goward show, and we still cannot get any answers. I would like to know a little bit more about this. I have the copy of the lease. I have a copy of the Pru Goward program which I am quite happy to let the Chief Minister look at. I am quite happy to table it and get some straight answers on this system out of this Government.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (4.44): Mr Deputy Speaker, Mr Moore's matter of public importance casts a very wide net and it requires a broad response because, as my colleague the Chief Minister said, his treatment of most of the issues was superficial. To do Mr Moore justice, I think he meant to make a general statement about the leasehold system and he meant to say to this Government that he intends to keep it up to the mark on the leasehold system. He is well known for taking an interest in the leasehold system.
On the other hand, the Labor Opposition has taken a whole range of miscellaneous, opportunistic points that do not harmonise with Mr Moore's comments at all. They are simple, grandstanding comments and they do not add to a debate. Those of us who have had years of knowledge of the leasehold system - I include my colleague Mr Kaine and Mr Moore in that - well know that the Labor Opposition facing us now, without exception, has never been around. We never saw them at the great debates in the mid 1980s and onwards. What knowledge they have of the leasehold system they seem to have acquired during the very short lifespan they had in government.
I was reminded, when Mr Moore put the issue on, of how different the ACT is. First, we started with the Seat of Government Act that made sure that so far as possible the great carpetbagging land boom speculations of the colonial era would not occur with the land ceded here by the then New South Wales Government. By and large, acre for acre, yard for yard, the dealings in land in this Territory are almost lilywhite compared with what has occurred on the Gold Coast, on the north coast and all around us in Australia.
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