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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 736 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

but in the Land (Planning and Environment) (Amendment) Bill (No. 4) 1996, which the Government introduced last year to implement its response to Stein, it deleted the relevant section of the AD(JR) Act altogether. The Government did the opposite of what it said it would do in its response to that Stein recommendation. This deletion took away what was previously a citizen's right to legally force the Government to correctly administer the Land Act.

The Planning Minister, Mr Humphries, has already publicly responded to my Bill by implying that the Stein report has been done to death in the Assembly and that the Greens should not be reopening the debate that occurred on the last sitting day of 1996 on the Government's amendments to the Land Act. I would say in response that the matter addressed by this Bill has not been adequately debated in the Assembly. The particular clause of the Land (Planning and Environment) (Amendment) Bill (No. 4) 1996 that dealt with the amendments to the AD(JR) Act slipped through the long and complicated debate we held in the wee small hours on the last day of sitting last year. Despite the raft of amendments to the Bill that were debated on that night, there was no mention at all of this clause of the Bill. I do not think anyone here realised the full implications of clause 87 of the Land (Planning and Environment) (Amendment) Bill (No. 4) 1996, and it certainly was not made clear to us by the Minister. The explanatory memorandum merely stated that this amendment removed the right of a person to seek a statement of reasons under the AD(JR) Act where the person considered that the decision was contrary to law. It did not mention that it also removed the person's right to make an application to the Supreme Court for a review of that decision.

In addition, the Minister's presentation speech merely stated that the AD(JR) Act was being amended to bring it into line with the standing of persons seeking review in the AAT of decisions under the Land Act, but the Minister failed to acknowledge that a judicial review of whether the rule of law is being maintained is quite different conceptually from an administrative review of the merits of a particular development application. The problems with this amendment to the AD(JR) Act were made apparent to us only earlier this year by the solicitor of the Environmental Defender's Office, who I understand contacted all members of the Assembly on this matter. The Environmental Defender's Office also went to the trouble of preparing and circulating possible amendments to the Land Act that would correct this error, which I thought had great merit and which I have tabled here today in this Bill.

The Bill does not seek merely to reinstate the relevant sections of the AD(JR) Act; it seeks to implement the full intention of the Stein report recommendation No. 95. It allows any person to bring civil proceedings in the Supreme Court to enforce any aspect of the Land Act, not just to seek judicial review of specific administrative decisions, which was previously allowed under the AD(JR) Act. The wording of the Bill is modelled on section 123 of the New South Wales Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. As the Stein report said, the open standing provisions included in this Bill have been in every planning and environmental statute in New South Wales for as long as 15 years and are also in place in South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania.

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