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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2391 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

It was a whole two months. He continued:

That letter was written, as I recall, a couple of months ago. The statement you referred to I made in the Assembly last year. Mr Speaker, I can hardly be responsible ...

As I said, the statement was not made "last year"; it was not all that long before the final statement. Let us look carefully at what the Minister said. He admitted to knowing about a letter - he did not table it; he did not explain its contents - and he gave the impression that the Federal Government had its own agenda of change, which is somehow completely divorced from us, from him, from Mrs Carnell's actions or from anybody else; just the Federal Government. He said:

I hope that it does allow us to have a debate in this place, perhaps even in this term of the Assembly, on the provisions for changing the nature of the tenure of land in the ACT.

In doing so, he then entirely ignored the fact that the debate had been had, that the position of the Assembly had been stated clearly and that a major and thorough report into leasehold had totally rejected any change already. In December, from the quote that I used, the shift in attitude was patently clear, as was the Minister's high level of contempt for the Assembly. That was in December. But the bombshell, the real issue at stake, came during the Property Council lunch early in July this year when an announcement regarding the impending change to the leasehold system was made.

To get to my fourth piece of evidence: As you will see, what the Minister said to Alex Sloan on her Drive program is the most serious of my allegations and makes my case that this Minister has handled his portfolio extremely irresponsibly and should lose the confidence of this Assembly. He began by affirming that he believed leasehold was here to stay. I quote that piece:

We've said we think that, we understand that leasehold is here to stay. We can't, for constitutional reasons as much as anything else, do away with the leasehold system but we can make it much more like freehold and acknowledge the fact that, when you invest as a householder, you know, $150,000, $200,000 in a house or as a business - $7m ... - that you're investing for keeps, not just for the duration of, you know, a 20 or 30 or 40-year period to run on a lease.

This is the piece that I think is very telling. He then proceeded to say coolly, "We have had discussions with the Federal Government". He did not say "after consultation with my Assembly colleagues" or "in a bipartisan way"; he did not even say "after getting the nod from an Independent or two". No; he said, "We have had discussions with the Federal Government". Suddenly, we are the problem, not the Federal Government all of its own volition. Suddenly, Mr Humphries does have the power to influence the Federal Government, despite what he so mockingly told us in the Assembly. He said:

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