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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4842 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

Labor is willing to support this Bill today, not because of all the conspiracy theories that have run amuck in the community and not because we believe that the Liberals have good answers - they have not, to an awful lot of things - but because we believe that this is an open and transparent process that is being proposed for the planning and management of land in the ACT. It does the following things that make it transparent: It puts into legislation the pre-application process, which was the subject of so much unfortunate comment in Stein. I will not accept for one moment that there was any corruption or any collusion, yet that was the insinuation that was made. I believe that the pre-application processes and the processes that were being negotiated before the inquiry were quite proper and helpful processes, in which bureaucrats were involved in trying to get the best outcome for the Territory. Without this sort of legislative protection, they were open to accusations of improper conduct - which were never verified, yet which still hang around.

This pre-application process that is now in legislation has already been tested and found to work. It puts into place quite clearly a way in which a proponent can come and find out what is possible, how it works, what they will have to do, what they cannot do, what barriers there are and how to get through them. It makes the decision process open beyond that. It offers the proponent a clear-cut path for the sorts of things that the proponent must do before a decision is finally reached. By putting it into a pre-application process, a proponent can then enter the process of a development application knowing full well what is to come, without any guarantee whatsoever that they are going to get the tick or are not going to get the tick. They were never given it anyway, but they were always left open to the suspicion that maybe somebody got something through because of something they said to someone along the way.

This makes the process transparent, open and absolutely straightforward, and no-one can ever be accused of falling outside it, unless they actually do. It creates a new and very important position. In creating the position of Commissioner for Land and Planning, it opens up the possibility for a circuit-breaker, which we have never had before. This position allows objections to be heard and dealt with. It allows decisions to be reviewed. It allows for an absolutely outside person. We have never had this position before. I think it is a breakthrough and a very intelligent solution to a very complex problem. It puts into the proper place, I believe, appeal rights and how they should be dealt with.

Overall, Labor finds that the legislation is the first step in dealing with the range of serious issues that were raised in the report into the administration of the ACT leasehold, in the Mant/Collins review and in the work of the Red Tape Task Force. It is taking seriously what both the community and the business sector want. I think it offers an intelligent way forward to deal with lease and land management for our future, rather than trying to link us to some past structures which no longer serve the emerging needs of the ACT.

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