Page 4723 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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Mr Moore is attempting to reflect what the practice of the department has been. When people ring in and say, "Is X conducting a legal practice from that house?", the department will usually send out to that interested person the relevant details. It is passive. Nevertheless, people at the end of the street may have an interest in it; they may be affected by the traffic generated and the rest. As one person who has had to run the gauntlet of that system - successfully, I might say - surely this should not attempt to limit the rights of residents in relation to whether a panelbeating shop or the like is conducted within that suburb, not only that street.
The Rally supports this attempt to widen the scope and the Rally draws attention to the fact that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal will retain the filtering right against vexatious and frivolous complaints. As my colleague Mr Stefaniak well appreciates, it is the AAT which acts as a filter, not unknown public servants who are fearful of having a piece of legislation that will allow too much scrutiny of their actions.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal was set up after the legislation in 1975. I came back to this country from France and I watched a process whereby a full range of another government agency's activities in the deportation area were subjected to review by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Many senior bureaucrats and politicians were saying, "It is impossible; you will never get anyone out of the country, you will never deport any criminals because they are all going to be reviewable".
The fact is that the then president of the AAT, now Sir Gerard Brennan, set down guidelines for dealing with the nature of the applications. He asked the authorities to provide an effective scheme and a statement of reasons and policies and objectives for deportation matters. There is no reason why a reasoned statement of aims and objectives to deal with controlled activities could not be issued to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal here, the ACT one.
I am hoping to get Mr Stefaniak's attention because I am pleading a cause and we need some votes on it. I trust that he, as a lawyer in the chamber, will understand that what is being proposed here is quite reasonable. What is being proposed is the presumption that the filter should be applied by the legislature, us - effectively, by the public servants - and not by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which has proven that it will not let these review processes run out of control. It does not occur.
Despite the registry and procedural arrangements at the tribunal, the standards set by the presiding members following the tremendous example set by Sir Gerard Brennan when he was appointed president at the inception of the AAT, the vestigial fears still linger on in that most conservative of bureaucracies, the land planning area of this Territory. They have been conservative for years on
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