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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4767 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

open standing in the Supreme Court for people who want to challenge actions by the Minister or his officers under the Land Act. I believe that the resistance is wrongly conceived, because all I am doing is correcting an amendment to the Land Act that the Government introduced into the Assembly last year.

In the Land (Planning and Environment) (Amendment) Bill (No. 4), which was debated last December, the Government introduced a raft of amendments to the Land Act to implement its response to the Stein inquiry. Members will recall that the Bill was passed by the Labor and Liberal parties and that the Greens and Mr Moore objected vigorously to most of those changes. One of those amendments - clause 87 of the Bill - removed the open standing of persons under the AD(JR) Act to challenge the lawfulness of a decision made under the Land Act. Ms McRae claimed that the Stein report argued for the sorts of changes that Labor and Liberal voted for; but the Stein report, at page 316, on the issue of standing, says:

An open standing provision in the Land Act would remove any doubt as to the ability of a member of the public to seek to enforce breaches of leasehold/planning laws and thereby uphold the law. Such a provision would enable any person, irrespective of interest, to approach the Supreme Court for a remedy to restrain a breach of the Act. Open standing provisions, operative in every planning and environment statute in NSW (some for as long as 15 years), have the demonstrated capacity to ensure that decisions are made in accordance with the law and not contrary to it. They have not been abused and, contrary to the dire predictions of some, no `floodgates' have opened.

In addition, there has been no experience of intermeddlers or busybodies.

Debate interrupted.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Hird): Order! It being 5 o'clock, I propose the question:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

Mr Humphries: I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.

Question resolved in the negative.

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