Page 5366 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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minimum time. It would depend a lot on the nature of the proposal. The Minister then, on receipt of a report from the Assembly committee, which may in fact agree with the proposal, could then make a final decision and either withdraw the proposal in whole or in part or authorise its promulgation.
That is a solution. I do not know whether that would be accepted, but I put it on the table for discussion. Maybe that is something that we could look at in relation to the future of this concept. I know that Mr Wood has indicated that there will be a review of the legislation, and that may be one of the areas that he wishes to look at. Defined land is an important issue. It is too important just to write it off without expressing some of the concerns that I know the community has built up over long periods - concerns about the planning process and the failure to be fully consulted in the final stages, because usually that is when people find out about it and that is when the problems usually start.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.23): I really think that this debate about the inclusion of the concept of defined land in this Bill gets to the core of the problem and the things that worry people about planning in Canberra. If we picked up a lot of the things that Mr Jensen is putting to us, we could have at the end of the day a very prescriptive Act that, in fact, would make further development almost impossible because one would have to go through so many processes and get so many approvals from so many people, and get endorsements for this and consult on that, and gazette it here and get responses there.
One of the things that the Alliance Government had in mind when it set about drafting this Bill - and I think it is still a principle that has to be taken into account - is that there needs to be predictability in the planning process. We could write a prescriptive Bill. There are some people who even think that we should not allow another resident to build a house in Canberra. I saw an interesting letter to the editor of the Canberra Times on this matter the other day. With our natural rate of growth of over 2 per cent these days, I wonder how you tell those 2 per cent every year, "You are going to have to go and build in Sydney or Melbourne because we do not want you here" - let alone anybody that needs to migrate to Canberra for many, many reasons.
It is clearly not practical to say, "We are going to draw a ring around Canberra and there will be no more development - no more houses, nothing". There are areas of Canberra where you have to be quite prescriptive, I think, about what you can and cannot do. I think that the Forrest bowling club was a classic case of that. People have been
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