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Ms Szuty and I attempted, on that last occasion when this was debated, to point out the injustice of this stance. Those greedy and unreasonable landlords under whom tenants are suffering would continue to get away with deplorable behaviour if we did not take action. Both the Labor Government and the Liberal Opposition, I believe, let many small businesses down on that day by denying them access to the umpire. That is primarily the issue I seek to raise in this debate so that the position can be reconsidered.

The very people for whom this action was instituted were not protected. They are the ones who entered into a lease prior to January 1994 and are at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords in our major centres. Mr Speaker, I presume that other members have been approached by some of the same people who have approached me in the last short while, raising this issue and explaining the frustration that they have in trying to measure up to the demands that such landlords are putting on them - which are, to any reasonable person, entirely over the top, entirely unreasonable. These are the sorts of issues in respect of which a tribunal would not hear just one side but would be able to hear both the arguments from the perspective of the landlord and the arguments from the perspective of the tenants.

I should also point out to you, Mr Speaker, that there is the irony I drew attention to in another debate this morning. These same landlords are often the ones who put pressure on the ACT as their landlord, saying that they ought not to have a landlord at all but ought to have freehold land - or de facto freehold land, as the Liberals advocate - in order to avoid the same sort of pressure being put on them. If any demands are put on them as tenants of their leases, they are the first ones to scream and say how unfair it is and how we have to remove red tape and remove any things that make business harder. Yet they in turn subject their tenants to incredible demands and to incredible red tape. There is a great irony in this, and I think “hypocrisy” needs to be added to those words that I used earlier - “greed” and so forth.

Because the Commercial and Tenancy Tribunal Act did not apply to all existing tenancies, some tenants are now the victims of gross injustice. The code, as it now stands, permits a continuation of these unfair practices against those most in need of protection. Surely it must be obvious that commercial tenants who existed prior to 1 January 1994 were the bulk of the commercial tenants in the ACT. The arguments advanced by some about retrospectivity were merely an attempt to derail and reduce the effect of the legislation. The idea that was supposed to appeal to us was that we should not interfere with a commercial contract that had been entered into prior to the legislation.

There is no doubt that, if we do nothing, eventually the Act will take effect. Perhaps after five or six years all new tenancies will effectively come under this Act. But it seems a great shame that for the next four or five years, or however long the period is - for some it will be less than that - people will not be able to appeal to a referee to sort out such problems. In all of these cases, Mr Speaker, I want to emphasise that I am not saying that we know what is right. All we are saying is that, if we had set the legislation up to take this into account, then we would have had the opportunity for an appropriately constituted body to make a decision about what was fair and what was not fair, having heard both arguments.

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