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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (8 April) . . Page.. 659 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I think it is dangerous to pre-empt the results of that process by deciding that property management agreements must be a condition of the issue of leases. There is a practical problem, even if that is not considered to be an appropriate long-term policy, in that there would be a large number of leases which would be proposed to be issued in the next few months and which simply cannot be issued because property management agreements are not in place.

If Ms Horodny would like us to go through the formality of having a property management agreement for the sake of being able to issue a lease to someone who is waiting to get a lease over the land, if, say, a property is being transferred from one person to another and they need to get an urgent grant of a lease, then fine; we can rush through property management agreements which fulfil the legal requirement but do not actually address the issues in respect of that property in any particularly detailed way. But I do not want to do that. I want to deal with this issue adequately and properly and ensure that the PMAs are really about getting to the nub of what the key issues are on that particular property. It is about an individual assessment of what the key issues are on that particular property. On some properties it will be about pest plants. On others it will be about particular feral animals. On others it will be about erosion problems. On others it will be about reversing the effect of the use of chemicals over a period of years. There will be all sorts of different issues.

Those are issues which I acknowledge have taken a long time to work through, and I would urge members not to be pre-empting that process by building this provision in here. It really does not belong in this Bill in any case. This is about declaring pest animals and plants. It is a technical thing which simply translates what we have done before into updated legislation, and I would argue that we ought not to be doing this at this point. I am certainly happy to come back to these amendments when we have the report of the rural leases task force and see whether it is appropriate to build that in at that stage under these mechanisms. My advice is that some of this may run counter to the work being done on that process, and I would say it is not appropriate to do it out of the context of that particular review.

MS HORODNY (11.18): Mr Speaker, Mr Humphries is suggesting that we cannot put any property management agreements into place until the rural task force has completed its report. One of the arguments that I have been putting forward since that rural task force has been established is that it has a very limited brief. I believe that that task force should be looking at these very issues of conservation and land management. You cannot look at the whole issue of leases in isolation from the agreements and the conservation issues that are so integral to the whole leasing arrangement. One of the reasons why I thought the rural task force was set up was to look at the interrelationship between the length of the leases or the financial implications and how that impacts on the management of the rural properties, particularly in terms of the conservation issues.

I think it is unfortunate that the two processes have been occurring in parallel, but there does not seem to be any crossover between the work that the rural task force is doing and this sort of legislation that we are looking at today. They seem to be occurring in isolation from each other, and I think that is a real problem. I would urge members

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