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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3762 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

with our offices, undertake the necessary drafting work. I think the result is a very good example of how this place can work very effectively if the will is there to do so. I would like to thank the Government officers who have spent considerable time over the past week or so with non-Government members to facilitate the easiest possible passage of this Bill.

To facilitate the easy passage of this Bill, I will be moving most of the amendments which have been worked out by the non-Government parties, but I am actually just representing the work of the whole Assembly when I do so. A major concern of the non-Government parties was the proposal that parties could contract out of the standard terms in the legislation, provided they received independent legal advice. A second concern was the proposed structure of the Residential Tenancies Tribunal, and a third concern was the absence of a standard lease. A fourth issue we have dealt with is legal representation and the capacity of the tribunal to award legal costs. We have also been concerned with the coverage of ACT Housing, coverage of people receiving some form of supported accommodation, the jurisdiction of the tribunal, and the proposed abrogation of the common law privilege against self-incrimination without any necessary safeguards being in place.

I will deal with many of the critical issues now, before we reach the detail stage. In the proposal we put to Mr Humphries we were prepared to accept an exception to the amendments I had drafted which preserved the integrity of the standard terms. We have agreed that knowledgeable parties can agree upon terms inconsistent with the prescribed terms, provided it is approved by the tribunal on a case-by-case basis and it is in the interests of both parties and with no element of exploitation. Without "fraud or undue influence" is how it is worded in the proposed section.

As part of our package we have asked for an improved dispute resolution process. Critical to our position is to ensure that the tribunal is a place of expertise. A recommendation of many reviews of tenancy legislation in Australia, including the ACT CLRC report and the 1995 minimum legislative standards report, is the importance of specialist independent residential tenancy tribunals for dispute resolution. The forum should also have exclusive jurisdiction over all tenancy matters. I think recommendation 113 from the CLRC report sums it up very well when it says:

The Tribunal should be a low cost, informal forum for the quick resolution of disputes in which people appear in the main without representation. The procedures of the Tribunal should operate with a minimal level of formality and ensure that disputes are resolved in a fair and consistent manner.

The model we have come up with in the past week, which will enable the Minister to appoint members with expertise and experience in this area in addition to the president, is a vast improvement on the original model. It is by no means perfect, but I think it is a significant compromise on the model that was proposed by the Community Law Reform Committee. There are still some issues of concern, particularly in relation to the resourcing of the tribunal; but at least we now have gone some small way to having a stand-alone tribunal. The tribunal in the model before us may be constituted of the president, a magistrate, the president and two other members, or another member sitting alone. Members will be appointed under the Statutory Appointments Act.

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