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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 3100 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I will continue with that policy, because I believe that those sorts of steps are likely to produce a responsive attitude by landlords in the Territory - a combination of carrots and sticks, if you like, to resolve disputes. Even with the best will in the world, if people need to resort to the Tenancy Tribunal to resolve every dispute they have, we will have failed to facilitate an environment in which those disputes do not arise, because hearings in the tribunal are costly and time consuming and do not happen over a short period of time. There must be other mechanisms. Those mechanisms principally revolve around an environment of fair negotiation and fair dealing between landlords and tenants and an environment in which mediation is used readily and accessibly to make sure that disputes are resolved.

I stand very much behind those first two steps as a way of resolving these matters, and I also stand behind those tenants who seek to have access, under the other arm, to the Tenancy Tribunal. That is the result of my actions so far in these disputes. As I said, it has been to intervene in every case on the side of the tenant to facilitate jurisdiction by the Tenancy Tribunal, and I will continue to do so. I have met with both Lend Lease and Leda and said to them in no uncertain terms that I regard conduct which has the effect of driving down by attrition the actions of tenants to take action in the Tenancy Tribunal as being totally unacceptable. I indicate publicly today, to Leda in particular, as the landlord of the Hyperdome, that, if they do not take every appropriate step to appropriately mediate their disputes with their tenants, then the Government will continue to intervene on the tenants' side to ensure that there is access to the mechanisms in the Tenancy Tribunal and that justice is done to those tenants. Those tenants who are in dispute with Leda at the moment do not need amendments to the legislation. They are there already, Mr Speaker, and that is the point Mr Moore seems to overlook. Their access to the tribunal was challenged twice by the Hyperdome, by Leda, and we have twice been able to defend it to ensure that the jurisdiction was not ousted.

If there are other tenants who are encountering any difficulty, I would like to hear from them. I have said on a number of occasions, in fact to a number of organisations who claim we need to widen the net, "Who are the people who are not covered by the net at the moment? Where are they? Why have they not written to me or approached me and spoken to me about these problems? Other tenants have". I can list a large number of tenants in premises around this city who have come to us and talked about the problems. They approached me personally, one of my colleagues at one of our Meet the Minister exercises, for example, or the Consumer Affairs Bureau directly and asked for help. I say again that I am happy to talk to these people, to understand what it is that is missing from the present framework. Mr Moore's legislation, with respect, has more impact in the area of symbolism than it does in actually changing the climate for people who are at the present time in need of some assistance. That is my impression, anyway. If I am proved wrong, that is fine; but I have not yet seen the cases which demand the action of Mr Moore's urgings.

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