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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4886 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: The evidence is not the fact that she says that people perceive it to be biased. The evidence has to be that it actually is biased.

Mr Moore: She supported her argument by saying that there has never been an assessment that has gone against the proponent.

MR HUMPHRIES: The reason it does not go against the proponent is that the proponent finds out if it is going against him while the PER or PA is being prepared and he does not continue with the particular proposal. We do not hear about proposals which turn out to be not tenable. The proponent works that out as the PER, or whatever, is being progressed. I do not accept Ms Horodny's assertion at all. I also do not accept that it is all right for members of the Assembly who should know better to come in and say, "We have heard people say that it is biased and we can point to a fact, a very bald and unenlightening fact, that all PERs support the proponent's point of view. Therefore, this proves that there is not a successful and unbiased PER or PA process". I think that is extremely naive and narrow-minded.

I would say to Ms Horodny that she should accept what Ms McRae has said - that there is a desire to overcome the perception of the work being in the hands of the proponent and therefore being biased - and work towards a way of providing for that work to be assessed and seen to be assessed in a neutral way. There are ways of doing that. One of those ways is that we consider the suggestion made by Mr Moore that the process be handled within the department, that the department retain the consultancy firm which does the assessment and that the proponent pay for it by giving a sum of money to the department, which then uses it to pay the consultant. That is one way. Another suggestion that has been made to me is that, rather than the proponent being able to choose his consultancy firm, he has to select randomly from a panel. A bottle is spun, as it were, and whichever name it points to is the firm which the person then has to use. That is another suggestion which I think has been put in the past.

Ms McRae and I discussed this problem a couple of weeks ago. We realise that the perception is there and we want to work towards doing something about it. Simply abolishing it, as Mr Moore suggests, is a little bit of a problem. I refer to the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment which was agreed to uniformly in about February 1992. That was obviously an act of the former Labor Government. Schedule 3 of that agreement describes the uniform processes to be used in this country for environmental impact assessments. Paragraph 3(viii) provides:

proponents will take responsibility for preparing the case required for assessment of a proposal and for elaborating environmental issues which must be taken into account in decisions, and for protection of the environment;

I am already on record in this place as saying that I think the process of agreements being reached by government needs to be more inclusive than the one that has been used in the past. Particularly where an agreement results in the necessity for legislation, there needs to be some way of the parliamentary process having a say in the agreement

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