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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 4478 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I have just tabled that response by officials to the issues raised. I circulated that to members of the Assembly over lunch in order to allow a debate to occur today on the issues raised in that paper and in the statement.

I have not yet made a decision in respect of that public environment report. The report is a complex document and I received it only in the last couple of days. I have yet to read parts of the documents prepared. I will indicate, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, that I believe a decision is warranted on this matter very soon. The application to issue a lease on that site was originally made more than two years ago. Exhaustive public consultation processes have been engaged in in respect of that site, including a preliminary assessment under the Land (Planning and Environment) Act and a public environment report. The latter has cost the taxpayer some $70,000. I believe that, while a large number of issues have been raised in response to that report, it is now appropriate for a decision to be made on that report, and I urge members of the Assembly to indicate their views on the appropriate course of action which the Government might take.

I will indicate to members that my preliminary view is as follows: That the club has demonstrated to the required extent that the proposal will not have an unacceptably adverse impact on the environment or on the amenity of people living in that part of Belconnen. I indicate that my inclination, on the basis of what I have read so far, is to accept the thrust of the environment report and to grant the lease to the club. However, I remain anxious to hear the views of members of the Assembly, as requested by the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment, and I look forward to comments made by members in that context. I move:

That the Assembly takes note of the paper.

MS McRAE (4.01): The process we are involved in today is a little unusual because it did involve a request in the middle of a process for the reassessment of this decision that is to be made by the Planning and Environment Committee. In addressing the issues that Mr Humphries has raised today, I want to talk about what I will be saying, first of all, to the Planning and Environment Committee and then in regard to this issue in general.

We have been lobbied fairly thoroughly to take this on as an inquiry to ensure that the process has been a fair and open one and to ensure that the best possible decision is going to be made on the basis of the information before us. What we found ourselves with was a series of contradictory claims, a whole lot of open-ended questions with things that were not quite clear, from a series of letters that the committee had received, that Mr Moore had received separately, that I had received and that the Minister had received. So the committee undertook to send all that back to the Minister so that we could be absolutely sure of the facts before any final decision was made. In fact, as I understand the process, today will be an airing of whether committee members are willing to take it on as an inquiry, first up, and then also an airing of our general party views about the proposal thus far, which, as I say, is an unusual process, because, in the normal course of events, these things have their own process of preliminary assessments which go public, further PER reviews, and other avenues by which the Minister can gather information before making a decision.

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