Page 5922 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991
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maintenance, in the long term, of their land. If we succeed in doing only one thing in this inquiry, it will be, I hope, to raise the awareness of the administration of the need to provide more security of tenure for those who work and live off the land of this Territory.
The committee's recommendation in paragraph 5.7 therefore, I think, is at the heart of this inquiry. We recommend that the Government introduce a tenure system for all rural leases with the objective of ensuring more certainty of tenure and achieving more effective land management by leaseholders. Those two things go intimately hand in hand. You cannot expect people to take an interest in the long-term maintenance of their land - and, of course, rural leases are particularly prone to neglect in this area - unless you make efforts in the way that you structure the leasehold system to give them incentives to do so. They must have a stake in the land; they must have a reason for wanting to preserve that land, and that is why we feel that there needs to be greater tenure.
That applies also, obviously, to the policies affecting resumption of land and the renewal of leases on the expiration of those leases. We must remember, of course, that many rural leases are not just businesses producing income that supports the owners but also, in a very real sense, the homes of many people who live on them. We saw some obviously quite attractive and well-maintained homes on some rural leases in the ACT. The obsession to plan in our community, the obsession to provide for a planned, controlled environment, sometimes leaves people out of its calculations. Although it is a fairly glib statement, I think it is true in the area of rural leases. We have seen that happen very clearly in rural leaseholds.
Mr Deputy Speaker, control obviously facilitates attention to certain problems such as, in the case of rural leaseholds, erosion and overstocking. The balance is to ensure that you retain those controls without becoming suffocatingly restrictive of those who hold those leases. I think we can see a number of measures that can be used to ensure that there is that level of control by the community over those problems - that is, things like erosion and so on - without becoming big brother, looking over people's shoulders, doing what they should be doing themselves, stepping in at all stages and interfering in the running of their businesses and their livelihoods.
We recommend, for example, that all future rural leases be subject to contractual commitment by the lessee to maintain the land on an environmentally sustainable basis, with contracts to include covenants regarding erosion control, tree preservation and regeneration, and exotic plant control.
That is coupled with the lessees demonstrating, in their application for a grant of land, a technical and financial capacity to manage their land. That is not asking them to produce degrees in agronomy or whatever; it is asking them
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