Page 1153 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 1991
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MR SPEAKER: The question now is: That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Detail Stage
Clause 1 agreed to.
Clause 2 agreed to.
Clause 3 agreed to.
Proposed new clause 3A
MR MOORE (12.07): I move:
Page 2, after clause 3, insert the following new clause:
"3A. Section 3 of the Principal Act is amended by adding the following definition -
'Betterment' means the increase in the unimproved value of the land arising from or as a consequence of changes in the permitted land use.".
Mr Speaker, in dealing with what is really a temporary Bill, first of all, I should draw attention to the fact that I voted with the Government on the in-principle stage because I recognise that what they are trying to do is ensure that the money raised from their announcement does actually come as part of the revenue. Whilst I have some disagreements on detail, I quite accept that the Bill is necessary. It is a shame that this has not been able to be done as part of the planning legislation, but I have said on many occasions that it is far better that we take a little bit more time with our planning legislation and get it right than run into the sorts of problems that I believe we are going to run into with this interim Bill.
The interim nature of the Bill, I think, clearly indicates that it would be far better to leave things as they are for the next three or four months. If we are making some changes we should have very good reasons for making them. In the principal part of the Bill the word "betterment" simply does not appear around the variation of section 11A and so forth; nor is there any definition of "betterment".
In fact, the word "premium" is used. We have been told in this house on a number of occasions that, when a word is not defined in an Act, the normal procedure for the court is to go to a dictionary. I am further advised that it is not a common thing for lawyers, under such circumstances,
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