Page 1584 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 April 1991
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... the Territory Plan can identify opportunities for development and set aside land for different purposes, it cannot guarantee that the development will actually take place, or the essential community needs will be met.
David Hall's comments were that that is precisely what the leasehold system should enable it to do - make plans happen. That is a critical factor. Those three things - the plan, the legislation and the leasehold system - have to be considered together. You have not done it and, because you have not done it, you have failed. Because of that I think these committees have failed in their task, and it ought to be approached again for the benefit of Canberra.
MR BERRY (5.15): The first issue that I want to deal with is the issue of the timing that was imposed on these committees by the Government. It was - as Mr Moore has said - a cynical exercise and, of course, the end result will be that there will be little confidence in this report because of the cynicism of the Government. It is most interesting, Mr Speaker, that the Minister responsible for planning, who was indeed responsible for rushing this legislation through the planning process, cannot even be bothered to be here to listen to the comments of not only the Opposition but also his own government members, so that his attention can be drawn to the problems with this report.
That issue of timing, of course, causes a lot of concern, and I doubt whether the committees have had time to deal properly with the issues before them. I think that the report has suffered because of the Government's cynicism and stubbornness about this issue. It is in a big hurry, but I will deal with that a little later on.
The next issue I want to deal with is the independence of the chair of these committees. I heard Mr Stefaniak warble on, a little while ago, about there being no legal problems with the independence of the chair on these committees. But, as Mr Stefaniak knows, it has long been held by the courts that independence not only is required to be set in law but also has to be seen to be the case. It is very clear that the chair of these committees is not independent of the Government; there is no doubt about that. This is a government report; these are government committees, and they were bound, from the outset, to toe the government line.
The following comments confirm the lack of independence of the chair of the committees. Julie Derrett, on 14 April 1991, said:
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