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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4381 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

presented, as I said, within three sitting days of when I received it, in line with the appropriate legislation. Mr Speaker, I still find it very difficult to accept that those opposite, who never produced this sort of information and never tabled it, can be doing anything but saying, "Thank you very much, Government, for providing information that we never provided".

Mr Whitecross: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I understood that it was customary, when you found out you had misled the house, to apologise for misleading the house. Is Mrs Carnell going to apologise?

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order. Resume your seat.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, through you, I have a question to Mr Humphries, Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning. Minister, I am sure you will have read an article by planning consultant Tony Powell last Saturday which criticised the call for expressions of interest for section 41 in Manuka. Is there any substance whatever to the points made by Mr Powell in that article?

MR HUMPHRIES: I thank Mr Kaine for that question. I did see the article in the Canberra Times that Mr Kaine referred to and was partly dismayed and partly amused by what I read. Mr Powell makes a number of serious allegations in this. It is not the first time, I might say, that allegations like this have been made. They have often been made by various people in various ways throughout my time in Canberra. What is disturbing is that they are made by somebody who really ought to know better in this case. He says in his article:

... the Government is colluding with developers to merit urban redevelopment projects which might provide income for the Budget and profits to the developer, but which have adverse effects on the community.

By collusion I mean secret agreements in order to deceive the unsuspecting public as to what is intended by developers until it is too late for affected residents or businesses to do much about it.

That is a very serious allegation, Mr Speaker. He goes on:

The relationships which have developed since the advent of self-government in 1989, between the ACT Government, the bureaucracy, developers and the building industry in relation to the operation of the planning system, cannot be regarded as being in the public interest.

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