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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 3098 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Moore is quite certain that he has a formula which is going to solve the problems of those people who are not yet covered by the legislation.

Mr Moore: Everything that will assist small business.

MR HUMPHRIES: That may be; but it is also potentially unfair to change, retrospectively, the arrangements which landlords and tenants have entered into. That is the case, retrospectively, in order to achieve a larger goal for operation of the legislation. I do not think that is wise or sensible. This very issue was debated when the legislation was put forward originally by Mr Connolly. Mr Moore moved an amendment which is probably identical to the one which he puts forward today.

Mr Moore: Very similar.

MR HUMPHRIES: Or at least very similar. The Assembly considered the issue and voted against it. I do not believe that anything has changed since then to alter the fact that there needs to be consideration of what we have achieved so far before we widen the net of the legislation.

Mr Speaker, I do not think there is any doubt that legislation like this has been necessary because there has been a large number of cases of what I would describe loosely as harsh and unconscionable conduct by landlords in this city. I do not think it is inappropriate to make reference to the fact that the Government has been active in the Tenancy Tribunal over the last year and a half to impress on landlords, in particular, that the legislation is there; it has to be allowed to operate; and attempts by the landlords to circumvent the effect of the legislation will have to be resisted by the Government. The Government intervened in proceedings before the tribunal, I think late last year, to prevent a decision standing which would have - this is the famous comma incident - ousted the jurisdiction of the tribunal in a number of matters. The Government, of course, moved quickly to insert the comma in the legislation and applied that retrospectively to the date of passage of the legislation so that those tenants were able to proceed with their actions in the court.

Similarly, when one particular landlord - the landlord of a large mall in the city - decided that it would take another step to oust the jurisdiction of the court, arguing, as I recall, that any tenancy entered into before the beginning of the new legislation on 1 January 1995 had to be excluded from the legislation, we went to the court and argued that that legislation should not be ousted in those circumstances. We succeeded. We have, in addition, attempted on a number of occasions to organise settlement arrangements for disputes between landlords and tenants in the Territory, particularly those in major town centre malls which have been, unfortunately, the source of a number of problems between landlord and tenant.

Mr Moore: This legislation would resolve such disputes.

MR HUMPHRIES: No; this legislation does not resolve all the problems. The process of mediation of disputes is also an important way of doing that. It is facilitated by but not dependent on the legislation. I took the step in the middle of last year of naming Lend Lease as a landlord which had been unable to resolve its disputes with its tenants.

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