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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4748 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I will speak to the amendments of the Greens later, but I think they achieve a series of things. First of all, they increase the range of trucks banned. Let me say that, in my interpretation of the Territory Plan, I believe the Territory Plan already bans many more trucks than this Bill will. I understand that the reason we have this legislation is that either that has not been policed or people consider it unpoliceable the way it is set out. I believe that that is the case. The amendments add a limit to the number of acceptable trucks allowed. The current position in relation to trucks parked partly on non-residential land adjacent to residential land being regarded as not parked on residential land, I think, is a very strange approach.

I should also indicate that I will be opposing proposed new subsection 150L(3), and I will give more detail about that later. I warn members at this point that proposed new subsection 150L(3) goes well beyond what should appear in a piece of legislation like this. It takes the planning legislation, it takes the Territory Plan, it takes the current lease agreement, and dismisses them, overrides them, on the grounds of a much lower level of legislation of a code of practice. I think we should look very carefully at that. If members look at it carefully, they will realise that deleting it does not undermine the rest of the legislation. It is one of a series of methods of ensuring that things can be achieved, but it seems to me that this is a quite inappropriate way to deal with a controlled activity. I speak specifically about proposed subsection 150L(3). It is an entirely inappropriate subsection and is not necessary in this legislation. I will speak to it in more detail at the detail stage.

MR DE DOMENICO (Minister for Urban Services) (5.58), in reply: I thank members for their contributions. Can I say that this has not been an easy issue to deal with; there is no doubt about that. I make no apologies for it taking so long. This Government does not want to be accused of not consulting properly with the community.

Mr Osborne: Of being cowardly.

MR DE DOMENICO: Mr Osborne, that is perhaps your opinion. It would have been nice to have had your contribution to this debate over the 18 months it has been going on. However, that is another case of people who are busy in other areas. I appreciate Mr Whitecross's comments, as I do Ms Horodny's and Mr Moore's. It is not gilding the lily to say that it has not been easy. Very quickly, this has gone through a massive community consultation process. We managed to get together all interested parties and we nearly managed to get unanimous agreement on what you see before you now. We had a couple of areas where people disagreed, and when people disagreed in those areas we decided to adopt the compromise approach. The compromise approach was lauded in relation to the previous Bill, and I think it should be lauded here as well.

The Bill proposes that vehicles over 7.5 metres in length and having a gross vehicle mass of over 4.5 tonnes will be permitted to park on-street and on land adjoining a residential lease for only one hour. On-street, for the purposes of this amendment, is considered to be from property boundary to property boundary and includes nature strips, footpaths

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