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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 753 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I must say that I sense, time and again, on the part of the Greens an intense reluctance to let the processes which this Assembly has voted into place in the Land Act take their course, as if somehow environmental assessments under the Land Act, preliminary assessments, preliminary environmental reports and so on are all a waste of time; they are all designed to cook the books and get desired results. I have to say that, although I did not personally draft that process - it was drafted and prepared by others in the debate by the Assembly some years ago - those processes are very robust and very extensive. I wait to hear what are the weaknesses in those assessment processes.

It will take months of work on the part of the Planning and Land Management Group of the Department of Urban Services to assess all those issues, to take on board community concerns about those issues, to process them and to put them back to the proponents to have them commented on. It is a very arduous process for any proponent to go through, and to suggest that this is not going to adequately reflect community concerns is just not right. It is just not true.

So, I would say that it is not necessary to scuttle this whole exercise and sink it to the bottom of Lake Burley Griffin in order to achieve what Ms Tucker and Ms Horodny have said are their objectives. We can achieve them now through the processes outlined in the Land Act, and I simply say to them: Let those processes take their course. If, at the end of the day, you do not agree with the result that comes out of it, put another motion to the Assembly saying that the proposal should not proceed. Put that to the Assembly then. You could do that, I suspect. But let the processes take their course. The indications to me via the spokesperson for the community groups that I met with are that the concerns are not the same as they were a few weeks ago or a few months ago. If that is the case, and I have been assured that it is, then I think that we owe it to the community to reap the benefits of this process rather than dwell on the supposed drawbacks of it.

MS McRAE (11.39): Mr Speaker, we will be supporting this amendment to the amendments to Ms Horodny's motion because I think what has been underestimated by others in this house is what a major concession this is. There has never actually been, in my memory anyway, a public analysis of projects where things have been rejected. Normally, of course, a Minister makes a decision. The decision is made public. Maybe the analysis of the decision is made public as to why the Minister accepted the advice, what the nature of the advice was, why the project is good or bad, what is going to go ahead and what the limitations on it are. But I cannot ever recall having access to all the other proposals and expressions of interest, the analysis around them and the pros and cons of them.

So, I do not think it should be underestimated what a concession this is and how it puts on the table information to enable the general public to have a really good look at what sorts of ideas there are in the community, what sorts of proposals there are drifting around, what sort of money is available for development within the ACT and the type of energy that we have in the business sector that is willing to do this, because these proposals actually cost an awful lot of money, time and effort to put in.

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