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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2530 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Nouvelle Homes, not Eco-Land. One of the other directors of Tokich Homes, a person who was not one of the five original group members, was also included in the application.

Mr Humphries implied on Tuesday that everything is now okay because Tokich registered the business name of Eco-Land last Friday. This is a great piece of retrospective approval. At the time the application was put in, at the end of 1997, Tokich Homes was definitely not trading as Eco-Land. The application was false, yet the land was still granted to Tokich Homes.

It is also of great concern that Tokich registered the business name of Eco-Land one day after the article appeared in the Canberra Times exposing this affair last week. We have since heard from Ms Lenihan, the original holder of the Eco-Land business name, that since late 1998 the Tokich brothers had regularly requested her to hand over the business registration to them - in her words - almost to the point of harassment. Once the newspaper article appeared last Thursday, Ms Lenihan started receiving phone calls and visits to her work from the Tokich brothers and, under pressure, has agreed to deregister the name so that the Tokichs can take it over. She no longer wants anything to do with them.

Mr Humphries told us on Tuesday that he was satisfied that all the five people involved in the Eco-Land group supported the application by Tokich for the land and that he had no evidence of false pretences. I am asking him what backing he has for those statements. Everything I am hearing would indicate the opposite.

Mr Humphries also said that the Government Solicitor's Office had provided advice that the Government was obliged to only give the land to the people on the application. Interestingly, he also said that he had looked at the advice and would give it to Mr Stanhope if he wanted it. However, when I asked for this advice later on he had to admit it was only oral advice. I wonder how he can read something that is not written.

Let me remind Mr Humphries of the note at the end of the statutory declaration form where the Tokich brothers declared that their statement that Tokich Homes traded as Eco-Land was true. It says that any person who wilfully makes a false statement in a statutory declaration is guilty of an offence against the statutory declaration Act and may be prosecuted. It also says that, in addition, a false statement may result in the application being withdrawn and negotiations being cancelled.

As the chief law officer in the ACT, I would hope that Mr Humphries would want the law to be complied with. So, I am asking Mr Humphries to explain fully to the Assembly how Tokich Homes ended up with this land that was originally supposed to be granted to the five people who put up the Eco-Land proposal back in 1996. Why was the Office of Asset Management slack enough to not check the accuracy of the application by Tokich Homes, or was there some complicity on the part of the OAM officers? Did they just want this project to proceed because they felt bound to follow through on the earlier ministerial announcements about the Eco-Land proposal, regardless of the fact that the Eco-Land group had changed?

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