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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2083 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

I will quickly just go through a number of them. One is the change from calendar days to business days in relation to notification, the time to respond to notifications and those sorts of matters. The change from 21 calendar days to 15 business days is, I believe, a sensible change. There is no change to the period of time available to people to comment. Indeed, there is potentially extra time, because it does not take into account those non-working days of Saturday and Sunday. This change to business days, I believe, clarifies this matter. It brings us into line with legislation in a number of other jurisdictions, and it is a sensible change.

Other changes in the bill, from my reading of it, include clarification that plan variations will have effect unless stated by the authority that there has been a notice of referral of a draft variation to the executive. That sounds like a somewhat complex change but it is not. Indeed, it is just another example of how to effectively streamline some of these processes.

There is clarification of the process for assessing a preliminary assessment on environmental grounds. Again, there was some confusion in the legislation as to how this would work, and this change is also a sensible one.

I note that under clause 9 of the bill there is provision for a grant of a further rural lease at less than market value. My understanding is that this is to deal with the rural leases package which was passed by the Assembly late last year. It would appear that this is an oversight, and it is obviously something that needs to be corrected.

Another matter I wish to identify as something we have considered closely is the issue of allowing for a register of lease and development conditions, including lease and development conditions granted before the register was established. At the moment, if my understanding is correct, the lease and development conditions on the register of lease and development conditions only include those since the register was established. So it is very difficult to identify lease and development conditions of leases that were granted prior to the establishment of the register.

Currently under the land act they cannot be put on the register. That seems to me to be a rather strange provision which requires rectification. Lease and development conditions are often issues of controversy. Often people want to be able to find out what the lease and development conditions of a block of land are, particularly if a block of land has remained idle, unused or undeveloped and someone believes that the owner of that lease is in breach of their lease and development conditions. If it is an older lease, it is very difficult to find out what the lease and development conditions are, because they are not on the register of lease and development conditions. This amendment puts them on the register, and that seems to me to be a very sensible change.

There are a number of perhaps more obtuse changes, but essentially this bill appears to provide for a streamlining of a number of processes and we welcome that. Anything that makes the land act easier to understand while still providing for appropriate accountability and transparency is something that we will always support, because we need to make every effort to make the planning process easy to understand for those who seek to use it for development as well as those who seek to use it to protect their interests in relation to a development matter.

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