Page 5921 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991
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issues, free-range eggs. We all have seen those programs on television indicating how difficult it is for a battery hen to have any reasonable lifestyle in the systems that exist in our egg production plants. There are also long-term reviews being done of hormone-induced egg and poultry production. For a city that is surrounded by suitable land, those issues surely could be tackled in small measure, initially.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Your time has expired, Mr Collaery.
MR COLLAERY: I commend those additional issues to the lessees when they are given full tenure.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.47): Mr Deputy Speaker, I just want to make a few comments on this; I know that we have other business this afternoon. In engaging in this inquiry I was struck by the extent to which the rural surrounds of the ACT contribute a very important influence on the ACT and its urban environment.
In my reading, examination of the submissions and exploration of surrounding areas of the ACT, I noted that there were five major reasons for having a rural context, a rural environment, for the ACT: It drew the national capital into its Australian context, the context of a nation spread across a continent with a predominantly rural landscape; it rooted our cosmopolitan city to the national and cultural origins of our nation; it mitigated the sterility of a planned environment in this city; it broadened the economic base of the Territory, not enormously but significantly; and it provided some educational value to those, particularly the young, who might wish to see how tens of thousands of Australians earn their living and who might be residents of cities all their lives.
Given all those roles that the rural environment plays in our community, it is surprising that there needs to be such a timely review of the rural leasehold system in the ACT. One would have thought that those influences would guarantee constant attention to the problems being experienced by this sector, but such has not been the case.
What is surprising also is how delicate one might consider the rural assets of the ACT to be. They are greatly affected, obviously, by things such as climate and use but also particularly by matters of government policy - in this case very markedly by a tradition of rural leasehold in the ACT. Tenure, or rather the lack of tenure, in this Territory has been responsible, as other speakers have mentioned, for some decline in the status of rural industry in the ACT.
It is undoubtedly the case, and has undoubtedly been the case for many years, that short leases have contributed quite significantly to a lack of interest, to a down-playing of interest, on the part of rural lessees in the
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