Page 1723 - Week 06 - Thursday, 13 August 1992
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This approach will ensure that the wider community has adequate opportunity to debate all issues relevant to private and public housing in a logical and manageable fashion.
I do not propose to preempt the Committees recommendations on tenancy law by taking any further action at this stage.
(2) It is not possible to give a definitive answer to this question. While some ACT laws expressly bind the Crown in the light of the ACT, many laws are silent on the issue. In respect of the latter, a rule of statutory interpretation at common law favours the Crown not being bound by the law in the absence of express provision. Following the recent High Court case of Bropho a State of West Australia (1990) 93 AM 207, the common law rule has been reexamined. While uncertainty remains, Courts may now be less reluctant to find that the Crown is bound by a law.
(3) The Government has adopted a policy that the Crown should be a model citizen. In order to give effect to this policy and to provide certainty Mi this area of law, over the next months the Government will introduce amendments to ACT legislation to put the public and the Crown on the same footing as nearly as possible. At the end of this exercise, I envisage that the Crown will be in a different position to the public in respect of the question of being bound by the law only where there are good reasons for this to be the case. Such cases will include situations where a Crown servant would need to be exempt from the law to perform his or her duties. For example, Parks and Conservation officers take samples of water from lakes for occasional testing. They should not be bound by a law that makes it illegal to remove water from -lakes.
(4) The Attorney Generals Department is now considering the best options for implementing the Governments policy given that sometimes there will need to be exceptions. The Government does not believe that the Crown will always need to be bound by provisions that require the Crown to pay itself fees or, as stated above, where the law would forbid the Crown from carrying out its legitimate functions. In addition, if an Act specifically covers private activities and not public activities then it is pointless to make the Crown bound by the Act.
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