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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 2779 ..

MR WOOD: I will second that motion, if you like. There is no guarantee that anything that happens will satisfy people who have a different opinion about whether a particular project ought to go ahead or not. Very often, when people have different opinions, they will blame the process or the legislation and not concede that maybe they do not want something to go ahead because they believe it will affect them. Mr Speaker, for these reasons, I am not going to get into the detail of this report. It is going to be impacted upon so much by Stein and Mant/Collins that to get into a heavy debate at this stage would be fairly aimless. I encourage Mr Humphries in his task and wish him good luck in what he is doing.

MR MOORE (11.29): Mr Speaker, I want to take a couple of moments to support some of the things that Mr Wood has said. In fact, there is a series of issues before the Government and the Planning Minister at the moment that have come through a series of reports that go back to before the Lansdown report. Those reports include this report of the Planning Committee in the previous Assembly, when Mr Berry was chair, drawing attention to a series of problems. There is no doubt that there are problems in the planning area. Those problems have been identified. One step forward will be developing a whole-of-government strategic plan of which the land use and planning strategy can form a part. That is something that I will speak about when I make a statement of behalf of the Planning and Environment Committee later today.

The challenge is there. I believe that it ought to have been done four or five years ago, certainly in the last three years; but at least the issues are now on the table and ready to be dealt with. I want to assure the Minister that I will do what I can to work with him, with the Government and preferably with the Opposition and the Greens to move it forward, rather than allowing it to get bogged down, as has happened in the past, to ensure that the community work together, to ensure that the community understand how planning will develop, to ensure that residents, developers and all other people involved in issues understand exactly what is proposed and how it should proceed. In that way we can get a positive environment in which all can work and live.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (11.32), in reply: Mr Speaker, I echo the comments made by others on the floor of the chamber. In fact, I have here a Government response to the committee report; but I will not be tabling it and members will not get to see it, because unfortunately it has all been superseded by the Stein committee report. I think it would be pointless to put on the table a series of responses that need to be comprehensively worked over in light of that report.

Ms Follett: You have already tabled a response.

MR HUMPHRIES: I am sorry. I thought I had not tabled it yet. You are right. Of course, I have tabled it. There you are - we are an open government. We put everything on the table. We even surprise ourselves with how open we are sometimes! Mr Speaker, this open and consultative Government likes to be able to put things on the table. As I say, this response has been superseded and it will be necessary now to develop a comprehensive new response.

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