Page 473 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 1991
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For the purposes of such a joint venture, the Board may, with the approval of the Minister - join in the formation of any company -
purchase, hold shares, make advances, and do other things.
It can then, under section 10, go onto the property market and become a property investor. It can lease, manage and run residential accommodation unit trusts. I would have thought the Labor Party, given its abysmal financial performance interstate, would start to run a bit shy of setting up statutory bodies to run investments and the rest outside their own Treasury. This is the profound difference, and the core of the reason why we cannot support this myopic, out-of-date, archaic proposal.
As governments retreat from the problems caused throughout this country by statutory bodies that have got themselves into trouble by being given free rein for investments, we do not propose any such bureaucratic apparatus. In the draft exposure Bill that the Government put out for public consultation on 24 January this year, we propose, of course, that we use our own Treasury services for that level of investment that is required. We also propose a much smaller bureaucratic structure. We propose an administrative team to handle the affair, not another statutory entity, a board with all the paraphernalia that goes with it.
Mr Speaker, we are an open, consultative, committed Government and, if you look in the Canberra Times day after day, you will see advertisements from this Government setting up advisory mechanisms. We have permeated most of the functions of government now with advisory mechanisms. The Follett Government did next to none of that in seven months of office. Mr Speaker, if you look in today's paper you will see more advisory mechanisms being set up. We propose to set up a similar, grassroots advisory body to look after, on a non-remunerative basis, the functions of this rental bond holding system. That is a better, more pragmatically based, trimmer, leaner, more consultative function than the bureaucracy that Labor is attempting to set up in its Bill today.
Mr Speaker, the Labor New South Wales Bill is pretty complex if you look at the provisions of it. Mr Connolly and his crowd are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. In support of my submission, I will quote a couple of statistics. On ACTCOSS' own figures, only about 6 per cent of the rental bonds in town - which are variously estimated to be between 13,000 and 14,000 at any one time - go to disputation. That is a point made by the Real Estate Institute in its response, and it is a point that is picked up by the Law Society. Let us not set up a great bureaucratic structure for a serious and important area of disputation.
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