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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2319 ..

MS McRAE (3.51): The Planning and Environment Committee's response to the Government's response to the Stein inquiry has already, as you have all seen, been used by one Canberran to attack the Labor Party - an irony, I suppose, not lost on the Government, when the Government's response initially was that it did not accept the land management authority or the land planning authority. Nevertheless, I am not unhappy about that form of attack. I think there is good reason for the decisions that have been made. The report is about a lot more than whether Labor supports the establishment of a land and management authority, which I may point out was never Stein's original recommendation anyway. The proposal that was discussed in the paper today was something completely new because it was an amalgamation of two authorities. We had a completely different scenario, but Labor, of course, is the rat in the pack. Never mind.

The report, in its 90-plus recommendations, covers a range of far more serious issues than simply bureaucratic structures. It talks about FOI management, the management of files and the management of joint ventures, just to name a few. The Government has accepted all but 16 of the recommendations made by the Stein board. Even those that the Government disagreed with were not rejected outright. In most cases, the Government provided a compromise or a partial response that was sympathetic to the thrust of the recommendation.

I must say that my further and much closer and more detailed examination of the report subsequent to my first response has simply underlined my first reaction to the report, which was one that I felt was very much in sympathy with the recommendations of Stein and, more than that, an intelligent resynthesis of a lot of what Stein recommended. To that end I will continue giving the Government my support and the support of this side of the house. In regard to a few of the recommendations, we have asked for further work to be done, and I will elaborate my reasons, at least, for asking for that work to be done.

Something that has to be remembered is that the Government's response to Stein took in other significant reviews. It was not simply a response to the board's inquiry. It took into account the reviews that had taken place before Stein, which included the process review undertaken within the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning. The Mant/Collins review which, of course, happened while Stein was on, was also taken into account. The Red Tape Task Force review also happened at about the time that Stein was happening and built on the work that was done by the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee of the previous Assembly. It is important to remember that all of those reviews were also being incorporated into the Government response, which I think added a great deal more in terms of why the Government could argue the positions that it did.

Since the very first Assembly, the management of leases and land in the ACT has been contentious. There have always been tensions between the rights of the community to have a say in the development of this city, the return of maximum profit to the community from the sale of their land and leases and the need to encourage and maintain development and redevelopment in the ACT. All of the reviews since 1989 have dealt with one or another of those tensions and those perceived conflicts of interest. The PDI review that I mentioned, in 1994, identified problems encountered by the general public and bureaucrats. The process review in 1995 tried to unravel the source of frustrations

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