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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2422 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

and the concerns we would have if it were not in place any longer. We were arguing that in a way you had gone behind the back of the Assembly - I believe that is what my colleague said - but I want to make it clear that, while you are saying you have publicly shown the letter that you have written, we still believe that it is an inappropriate process to have done that before there has been full debate in this place about the issue. We still have a concern about the process and the way it has been run by you as Minister.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to respond to that point very briefly.

Leave granted.

MR HUMPHRIES: It will be very brief. I accept that Ms Tucker does not accept that we should have done this; but the point I make is that we did this initially by letter that was sent to the Federal Government, I think, in September of last year. That letter was tabled here in December. Why have you waited eight months since it was tabled to bring this matter up in this way? You said that we had gone behind people's backs. We have been open about it at all stages. We brought this forward and we put it on the table in order to show our openness about this matter.

Mr Berry: You were forced to.

Ms Tucker: That is a matter of timing, not the essence of the argument.

MR HUMPHRIES: No; members asked us to table it and we did.

Mr Berry: Questions were raised and you were caught out and had to. Otherwise, you would have had a motion - - -

MR HUMPHRIES: The fact remains that the matter was put on the table. If members did not like it then, they should not have let it drag on for eight more months while we have been continuing discussions with the Federal Government to pursue the matter. We told the Assembly that we were doing that. Nobody objected to it at the time, and we proceeded to have further discussions and further encouraged the Government to do that. We can hardly be condemned now because we have taken the thing a stage further without there being any action by the Assembly to stop us from doing that.

MS McRAE (4.39): I will close the debate. Let me begin with the first bit of silliness that somehow the wording of my motion does not include "misled". Quite clearly, I have lost confidence in the Minister because he has misled. That was the point of my four bits of evidence and my argument. He has misled the Assembly on the nature of his handling of this matter. I made that quite clear by referring to his actions, what he told the Assembly and what he has subsequently done. That was the point of it. He has clearly misled, and that is why I have lost confidence in his way of handling the potential extension of tenure of leases in the ACT to 999 years.

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