Page 5417 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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system so that nothing moves in Canberra. You will be bringing derision on this Assembly because nobody will know with any certainty what can happen. The whole system will get clogged up.
I believe that this is obstructionist and negative. It is not compatible with the type of government that we have elected to operate in this Assembly. In the interests of reasonable progress, of reasonable movement in the ACT and of ensuring confidence of the ACT community, both business and private, this proposal has to be rejected.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (4.37): Mr Speaker, I understand the concern of the Minister in this particular matter. I think it is, however, ill founded. I point out that the majority of the members of this Assembly, only in recent days, in fact made this amendment to the Interim Planning Act. In other words, it is the law now.
Mr Wood: And it is already not working.
MR KAINE: It has not been given a fair chance to work, Minister, and I think therein lies the problem. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that the Planning Committee of this Assembly, for the last three years, has been receiving copies of variations at the same time as they have gone out for public consultation. In all of that time, to my knowledge and understanding, in connection with only one has the committee conducted an inquiry. That was in connection with the Forrest bowling club quite recently. That was only because of the public controversy that surrounded it.
So, the evidence would suggest that the committee is not going to conduct an inquiry into every variation that comes its way. It will accept that most of them are variations that should properly go ahead without further study, without further inquiry. It will come back to the Assembly quickly and say so, and the Executive, in accordance with Mr Jensen's proposed new subclause to clause 25, which we have not got to yet, will then be able to go ahead and make its decision.
It will be able to make its decision in the knowledge that it has the endorsement of the Assembly; that the Assembly is not likely, after the event, to challenge as it had to attempt to do in the case of the Forrest bowling club. In that case, the Government had already made its decision and the committee felt that there was a need for further review. It undertook such a review, and it did so in a very short timeframe which made it very difficult for the committee to do its work properly.
I suggest that the Minister's worst fears will not be realised; but, as Leader of the Opposition and potential Chief Minister and, indeed, potential Planning Minister again, I give an undertaking to this Assembly that, if in our experience this becomes a bottleneck and planning
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