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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1245 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

There has also been a suggestion to me that the legislation, in fact, affects not just residential occupancies in the Territory but also commercial occupancies in the Territory. I have not put that proposition to Mr Moore to see whether he agrees, but that is the advice which I have received from the Department of Urban Services. I assume that there is at least some ambiguity in the legislation that might give rise to that suggestion.

On the basis that I do not believe that it is necessary and on the basis that I believe that there are some possible unintended consequences of the legislation, I indicate on behalf of the Government that we do not wish to support this legislation today. However, I believe that, in a sense, the issue which Mr Moore is raising is an issue which ought to be dealt with in another way, and that is through the device that the Government established last year to provide for local input into the formulation of rules that govern the way in which suburbs in Canberra look. I am, of course, referring to the local area planning advisory committees. The LAPACs are a device to ensure that people in local areas of Canberra get together and design rules for their area which are appropriate to their area and which may be rules very different to those applying or needed in other parts of the ACT. One of the intentions of the local area planning concept, I believe, is that it gives people the capacity to determine what is appropriate for their locality and for their needs. It is the Government's intention that, if the legislation today is defeated, the three local area planning advisory committees in North Canberra be asked to consider whether a concept such as that put forward in this legislation should be considered by those bodies and whether they would like to pick up that concept for their own areas or adapt it in some way for the needs of their local areas.

It is the Government's intention, as I have indicated before, to extend the concept of LAPACs to the whole of Canberra over a period of time. That, of course, will depend on the way in which the trial which is currently being undertaken in North Canberra proceeds and ends up. If that trial is successful and we, in turn, move to place this model across the whole of the ACT, then there will be an opportunity, through this device, for other areas of Canberra similarly to consider whether dual occupancy restrictions of this kind or some other kind might be appropriate for those areas of Canberra.

I emphasise again that applying this restriction in the ACT on a blanket basis at the present point in time does not appear to be sensible. It results in some legitimate needs for dual occupancy being overlooked. I believe that not all dual occupancy is unnecessary or inappropriate; there is some that is quite appropriate. There is also the question that needs to be asked: Where do we leave the many people who are already, in some sense, part way down the track towards dual occupancy? I think Mr Moore's legislation has the effect of exempting from the ban which he proposes applications which have already been lodged with the Planning Authority for a unit title. That is quite appropriate, of course, because someone has already gone to the trouble of proposing their development and is somewhere down that path and probably deserves to be exempted.

There are probably many hundreds of Canberrans who already have a property of some kind which might be capable of being converted to dual occupancy at the present point in time and who already have a lease variation approval for that to happen or who have a physical structure capable of making that happen. The question of how those people would fare under the change in the rules, I think, is a question that needs to be asked.

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