Page 4646 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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during his contribution to the debate. However, as I have indicated, that may well require some amendments to the legislation because of the link between the legislation and the plan. There are ways to do that, and the Rally will be seeking to bring those amendments through during the detail stage. I thank members for their attention this morning and I commend the comments I have made to the Assembly.
MR STEFANIAK (11.52): This is historic legislation, Mr Speaker. I was very happy, under the Alliance Government, to be the deputy chairman of the joint committees that looked at it. A number of issues were raised by me and my colleague Mrs Nolan in dissenting comments. I was pleased to see, however, that this legislation, which has been altered slightly by the Labor Government, although not to a huge extent, has the support of most groups who will be affected. It is good that it has been consolidated. It is crucial legislation.
There will be a lot of teething problems in some areas in relation to its operation. However, even today we can see from a couple of sections of the legislation that it is starting to work already, even though it has not been passed. Yesterday we had a very good example of the fact that the provision of a six-day sitting period for disallowance is sufficient. I can recall some of us wanting 15 sitting days for disallowance; but, as I indicated in April, in my additional comments in the report, six days seems to be sufficient. It was shown to be yesterday when, with three days to go, we had a very detailed debate on the proposals for the Forrest bowling club. The disallowance motion was unsuccessful on that occasion.
In the report and in the legislation, I am pleased to see that provision has been made for a fee for heritage listing. I think that is important. We need to look very closely at heritage listing. I had no problem with this Government's decision in relation to the heritage value of the Forrest bowling club. In many ways, it reminded me of a constituent who came to see me in July 1989 with a problem of rising damp and the need for some $30,000 worth of renovations to her house. She had all sorts of problems because her house was listed as a heritage house. The streetscape, certainly, had heritage value - it was a beautiful streetscape - but her house had been substantially modified, and well modified, since its construction in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
Her name was Bronwyn McCaskill and she had an original weatherboard house which had had some type of metal cladding put over it. There had been some further fairly grotty, to use her description, modifications to it before she bought it. It was in need of substantial renovations so that air could get into it to stop rising damp and, basically, to make it livable for her health and her family's health. She had to go through a quite convoluted process and she ended up, I think, winning in the
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