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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1246 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I take it that Mr Moore will want to comment on that when he responds at the end of this debate. I, for one, have some unease about where we leave people in those circumstances. There would be a large number of Canberrans in various stages of movement towards the end point of a unit titling - whether they actually have that planned at this point in time or whether it is an inevitable result of a decision that they have made at some point up to this time; for example, if someone has built some structure at the rear of their home to accommodate an aged relative who subsequently dies or goes to a nursing home and the need for that particular occupancy at the back of their residence changes.

As I have said, I believe that this is a blanket proposal which may not be appropriate in all cases. A more sophisticated response needs to be developed. It may be that what Mr Moore has put forward will ultimately be an attractive proposition to the many people sitting on local area planning advisory committees who consider that these things might be a good way of retarding what, for many people in Canberra, has been an inappropriate form of development. I will indicate also to the house that the Government has consulted with members of the building industry who obviously do not support the proposal in its present form. However, to its credit, the Housing Industry Association did suggest that local area planning advisory committees could be responsible agents in considering whether this proposal goes any further. That is the Government's position. As I have indicated, we will not support the Bill in its present form today.

MS McRAE (11.06): Mr Speaker, I hope that you have the oxygen and the first aid tent ready because I am about to put the Government into deep shock. For once in my life I am going to say, "I support the Minister's position". Have you heard? This is despite the fact that I could perhaps point out, maybe a little churlishly, that I do believe that it was Liberal policy to support all the Lansdown recommendations and implement them when they came into government. I will not go into detail on this. They perhaps did not support this one.

I am supporting Mr Humphries's position for this reason: Mr Wood did move swiftly after the Lansdown report, and the changes that he put into place did have the desired effect, as Mr Humphries pointed out; there being, as we have been told, very few dual occupancies happening in the last few years in the ACT. I do agree with Mr Humphries's proposal to put the policy of dual occupancies to local area planning committees. I believe this because each of our suburbs has a quite separate ambience; not only that, so do our streets.

I live in Aranda and I could tell you, from my visual observations when walking around the streets, where a dual occupancy would never hurt a particular street or a particular end of a street because there are little houses on huge blocks in a lovely suburb that I am sure, in time, people will want to live in and, therefore, develop a dual block. Yet, at the same time, in the same street even, there are big houses, well-established houses on fairly small blocks, by comparison, that nobody would ever want to put a dual occupancy on. I do believe that a blanket ban does prevent that variation that can happen sensibly in a suburb, particularly if there is some local area input and some sensible discussion at the local level that dampens down this scaremongering that can so easily happen once the debate arises again, as it did in 1993 and as it did in regard to North Watson, because of the fear that people have of urban infill.

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