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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1244 ..

Mr Moore: It made this recommendation.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, indeed. Mr Moore points out that it made recommendations, including the one that is before the house today. The then Government exercised its prerogative to accept some of the recommendations and modify or reject others. It put in place a package responding to that particular proposal, which resulted in a number of changes in the way that development occurred in the ACT. Some of those changes were not fully carried through, but certainly a number were announced by the Government and successfully carried through. Included in them was a requirement that in greenfields developments in the city dual occupancy would not be permitted until the houses concerned had been built for five years.

Whatever the nature of that package put forward by the then Government, in terms of Mr Lansdown's proposals that they were working from, the result was very clear. Unit titling of dual occupancy developments in this city has all but stopped. My advice is that in the last 18 months or so since the Lansdown rules were put in place the number of applications for dual occupancy development in the city has dwindled very significantly. Something of the order of 40 have been received in the course of the entire last 18 months, which would have to be viewed, I think, as something of a trickle.

Mr Wood: It had the desired effect.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Wood interjects, "It had the desired effect". I think it is clear that there has been a very significant slowing in the amount of dual occupancy development that has taken place in the ACT. As a result, the question needs to be asked: Is the proposal put by Mr Moore, which is, I would suggest, designed to kill a horse which is almost dead anyway, really necessary? Mr Moore, I understand, has put forward the argument that if economic activity in the Territory picks up markedly in the near future there is some chance that a renewed interest in dual occupancy could exist, and we would see many more applications coming forward than has been the case for the last couple of years. That may or may not be the case; I do not know.

I suppose I have a concern about elements of this proposal by Mr Moore, and the Government and I have a desire to see the issues which he has raised dealt with differently to the way in which he has put them forward in this legislation. The problems with the legislation are that, as it presently stands, a person having more than one occupancy on their property with fewer than four such units is unable to unit title at all. Mr Moore has indicated his willingness to accept an amendment which, I might indicate, the Government has actually prepared, to ease the effect of that proposal so that after a period of, in the case that we proposed here, five years - that is, five years after a certificate of fitness for occupancy had been issued in respect of the second dwelling - an applicant would be in a position to then obtain a unit title for that entire block. I think Mr Moore suggested originally that he would be interested if we were to bring forward an amendment which had a period longer than five years. As I say, this is academic perhaps because the Government, for its part, does not intend to support the legislation at this point in time.

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