Page 2065 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 May 1991
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They are our concerns. We await a clear response from the Government as to why it has chosen to delete the penalty for failing to lodge a condition report, because that is a fairly central part of this legislation. In the equivalent legislation in other parts of Australia there is such a penalty; and it does seem a useful sanction.
The one other minor matter which has again been raised with us as a concern is the fact that, where penalties are provided for, there is a reasonable excuse provision. It is an offence to, without reasonable excuse, contravene a section of the Act. The Attorney may like to reassure those tenant groups who are concerned that the reasonable excuse provision may be in some way used as an administrative method to allow landlords, in effect, to get away with things that the provision is more intended as an ordinary and desirable legal provision to give a court discretion to find that a person is not to be punished if they can come up with something. I see nothing sinister in that, but concerns have been expressed to Mrs Grassby and me, by persons representing tenant interests, that the reasonable excuse provision could be abused.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General and Minister for Housing and Community Services) (4.52), in reply: I thank the members for their comments. I should say at the outset that I am not yet aware of the details of the amendments proposed by the Opposition, but the broad nature of them has been explained to me. If the Opposition is proposing a workable provision to ensure compliance with lodging the condition report, to make that obligatory within a time period, I do not have an in-principle objection to that. Perhaps we can deal with that over the dinner break.
If the Opposition wishes to ensure that there is some financial assistance to tenants, particularly tenants who have some disability in presenting their case, so that an adviser is paid what could be termed a sitting fee, I again need to reflect on that matter over the break to work out what precedent we are setting, because there are groups in society outside this area who might equally claim, on the basis of social justice, a right to assistance. My mind goes immediately to women in domestic violence situations; where they do not qualify for legal aid they are not, to my knowledge, given assistance, even though they may well have language problems or low literacy skills. So, we do need to think of that in terms of equity between classes of persons approaching a disputation issue.
On the "without reasonable excuse" issue, I will undertake to look at that over the break to see what the current interpretation is.
Going back to the condition report, I do not have an objection in principle to the provision of a penalty for the failure of one or other party to lodge it. Of course, as the Bill is presently drafted, if the landlord or tenant has not completed a copy of the condition report, a
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