Page 2809 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 September 1994
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How did the Minister come to choose Mr Bob Lansdown to be the inquirer in this inquiry? At the start, I would like to make it very clear that in no way am I critical of the integrity of Mr Lansdown. It is really a question of who is appropriate for this inquiry. Mr Lansdown has been chosen, and I may well be proved to be totally wrong. He may have exactly what it takes to conduct an inquiry. If that is the case, I will be only too delighted to state it. I had proposed to Mr Wood, amongst other people, Professor Max Neutze and Professor Ray Bunker from the South Australian University. Professor Bunker was agreed to by Mr Wood, in an attempt to have an impartial inquiry. Unfortunately, Professor Bunker still had six weeks of teaching to go. He would not have been able to conduct such an inquiry within the set timeframe; he would not have been able to do it until towards the end of this year. That was, clearly, unsatisfactory for the style of inquiry that we are to have. It is appropriate for me to acknowledge that the Minister was prepared to agree to appoint Professor Bunker.
The great concern to me is that the reason I was given for Professor Neutze being inappropriate was that he had already spoken on this issue. The evidence for that was a Royal Australian Planning Institute newsletter of July in which a third person had reported what Professor Neutze had said. The Minister's office provided me with a copy of it and highlighted a couple of comments that were attributed to Professor Neutze. I returned the piece of paper, highlighting on the same page alternative comments made by Professor Neutze which clearly demonstrated that his position was neutral. Leaving that aside, if we take some very measured comments by an academic on some of the concerns about urban infill and say, "That means that the person is not impartial, and that means that he cannot conduct an inquiry like this", that leaves the Minister in a rather awkward position in relation to the comments made by Mr Lansdown last night on WIN television and reported in this morning's Canberra Times. Mr Lansdown's comments are in the language of the developers.
More importantly, I think it is reasonable to ask the Minister to answer this question: Before he saw Mr Lansdown at lunchtime today - I understand that he met with Mr Lansdown at lunchtime today, which was quite appropriate - did Mr Lansdown go and discuss the issue with the members of his department, with the bureaucracy? Has Mr Lansdown gone to a range of community groups and discussed the issue with them? Where are his priorities in this matter? As far as I am concerned, the most critical thing for an independent inquiry is to ensure that the inquirer is not relying on the bureaucracy to gain an understanding of what is going on here, because the bureaucracy has got it wrong. They got the Territory Plan wrong on this issue, as I stated when the draft Territory Plan was introduced in the last Assembly. Even when I voted for the Territory Plan as a whole, I drew attention to my concern on this specific issue, and that concern remains.
There are arguments for urban infill. For example, in an article in the Canberra Times of 6 August, Larry King, the ACT chief executive of the Housing Industry Association, stated:
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