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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 2625 ..
MR BERRY (continuing):
have been given to the drag strip that is out there. In that sense, the full market value argument put by Ms Tucker would constrain the government in its negotiations.
MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (12.00): Mr Speaker, I must say that I was delighted to have Mr Berry rise in this place and suggest, in effect, that everything the Labor Party had said in the past about how a government must obey the law, must recognise the law, must not break the law is now all going out the window. Apparently, it is now all right to ignore the views of courts and the law as made in the courts.
Mr Berry: I did not say that.
MR HUMPHRIES: I think that is what you did say, Mr Berry. We had a very clear decision from Mr Justice Cooper of the Supreme Court on 26 July this year that the ACT government did not have the power to grant a lease over that land. Mr Berry is running away, as he usually does when the pressure comes on. Oh, he is coming back now; wonderful!
Mr Quinlan: He knows what you are going to say.
MR HUMPHRIES: I know; that is why he is leaving. I am aware of that. In other words, had we granted a lease, as urged by Mr Corbell and others at the time that he raised these issues in the debate last year, when we had no power to grant the lease, we would have been breaking the law. Yet Mr Berry, who has time and again excoriated us on this question of breaking the law, now says, "Go ahead. Forget the courts; what do the courts know? Just get in there and do what you have to do. Stop the duck shoving; just get in there and do what you have to do. Forget about this pesky problem about the law."
Mr Speaker, I am surprised that the Labor Party has raised this matter. I am not surprised that most of the members of the Labor Party have abandoned the chamber, because they know what I am going to say about this matter. The fact is that the government's actions in this matter have been completely vindicated by the decision taken in the Supreme Court last month. Every decision that Mr Smyth took as planning minister in respect of that site has been affirmed by the Supreme Court. Mr Justice Cooper said, and this is a fairly unusual sort of statement to get from a judge of the court:
Having regard to the existence of the declaration of the land as national land, of which I find he was aware, the minister, acting honestly or honestly and reasonably, could not have concluded that the land was not required for a national land purpose.
That is absolutely crystal clear. We should be thankful for the fact that Mr Corbell was not sitting over here as planning minister to grant a lease, which he said he would have done if he had been in Mr Smyth's shoes, which the Supreme Court has found was beyond the powers of the ACT government to do. That is what the court found, Mr Speaker.
Apparently, this matter is now going on appeal to the Federal Court. The advice to me from the Government Solicitor's Office is that the result is extremely unlikely to be changed as a result of that matter going to appeal. In other words, the government's
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