Page 3349 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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Then the house is left to the cats home or whatever. In the case that Ms Ellis was referring to, mum or dad is forced out, stalks off down the street and realises that they put all the proceeds from the sale of their house into building the granny flat and they have no title to it and no recourse.
As Mr Humphries indicated, the law of trusts has been grasping towards solutions here, but it is an extremely expensive exercise to argue the toss on either of those very common examples - the example that the Chief Minister gave and the example that Ms Ellis gave. To argue that out would involve expensive litigation in the Supreme Court, with teams of solicitors and counsel and many, many thousands of dollars. It would be questionable in the case of an ordinary domestic relationship, an average family where we are talking about the proceeds of the average house, whether it would really be worth their while because it would be highly likely that the litigation would eat up virtually all of the value of the property that was being argued about.
Our solution is to focus on a definition of domestic relationship which gets away from just a sexual relationship and focuses on a caring and mutually supportive relationship, and then, importantly - and Mr Humphries acknowledged the importance of this - try to adopt the mediation first approach to solving the problem. We are trying to create a legal framework which solves the problem and to make that legal framework accessible. The essential problem to date has been that there has not been a legal framework to solve the problem, although the common law is moving in that direction. That legal framework in the past has been very inaccessible.
An interesting submission from the Conflict Resolution Service indicated that in the last three years they would have come across about 200 cases involving the non-de facto domestic relationship and the homosexual relationship, or cases involving caring for mum or dad, or mum or dad building the granny flat. A quite substantial number of people found their way to the Conflict Resolution Service. I think, inevitably, that would indicate that there are a lot more out there that they are unaware of, so there is a real need for this legislation. It is ground-breaking stuff, to the extent that it does not focus on just a sexual relationship and that it is focusing very much on a mediation approach.
I am confident, given the extent to which there has been community support for the legislation and, pleasingly, that there has been an indication from the Opposition that this will be looked at from the basis that there is a real need for this legislation, that the broad thrust is right. I would expect that the Government will be bringing forward the final Bill in a slightly different form, which may well meet many of the concerns that Mr Humphries foreshadowed. We may well have a debate on some of the details of the legislation. That is the nature of things. Fortunately, we are not going to have a debate which trivialises this important legislation by focusing only on sensationalism - that the ACT Assembly creates gay marriages or that sort of sensationalist nonsense. I am very pleased that there has been that mature attitude from both sides of the chamber to this problem. At the end of the day I look forward to the ACT having legislation which is seen and acknowledged as a model for other parts of Australia.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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