Page 4195 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 October 1991
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In opposition, Labor was critical of some of the complexity of the original five Bills and then the first consolidation that was drafted. In opposition, we were critical of the complexity. We thought it could be simplified and refined. I think there has been progress. There has been improvement in this final draft; but it remains a piece of legislation, it must be conceded, that is not the easiest for the untrained person to get around. I am sure that over time there can be further improvements.
What the legislation does do is get the essential elements into a single package. The challenge for the Government has been to get the balance between the competing attitudes and values right and to adopt an approach which is in the interests of the community as a whole. I believe that the Labor Government Bill which has been presented by Mr Wood achieves that goal.
One of this Government's principal objectives when proposing the legislation back in 1989 was that the Legislative Assembly should be the ultimate authority for planning in the ACT. This Government has achieved this by introducing a deemed disallowance provision which ensures that, where any member tables a motion to disallow a plan variation or any part of it, it must be debated by the Government or the variation will lapse.
That is modelled on the provision that Labor brought forward as a private member's Bill last year to amend the Subordinate Laws Act. Ironically, when the Alliance Government, to paper over the cracks, to cover the gap because of its failure to have achieved this legislation to this level by then, had to bring in the stopgap measure by way of the Interim Planning Bill, it refused to have that deemed disallowance provision.
We were in the position where, on an issue of vital community significance, such as the fate of the school sites when the Alliance was hell-bent on closing neighbourhood schools, it would have been possible for the Assembly never to have got to properly debate disallowance on that issue. Thus, it would have been possible for a government to use its numbers to prevent it from coming to a point where members had to stand up and be counted and say either, "Yes, we want development on this site" or, "No, we want it to remain as green space".
The importance of the deemed disallowance provision is that members of future Assemblies - individual members of future Assemblies who will, of course, be elected on a single member electorate system - will have to put their hands up and be counted in a vote when there is a disallowance provision. So, it will not be open for any member of this Assembly in the future to duck and dive and avoid being counted on an individual plan variation vote. That is a very important democratic principle.
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