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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (14 February) . . Page.. 170 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

You cannot get more clarity than that, I believe, and that, in fairness to the minister, is what he and Mr Moore directed the executive director of the Planning and Land Management Group to do. There was no ambiguity about it and there was no ambiguity about the motion passed in this place. But what happened after that? What happened after that was that somebody saw fit to hire a consultant to write a paper on the subject. I have never heard of this consultant; I presume it was done by a consultant. The paper has a name on the front of it. The purpose of that review appeared to be to achieve anything but what this Assembly required and anything but what the minister directed. The whole tenor of the report is to justify the retention of the policy of two residential units on each residential block.

I do not know who authorised that. I do not know who commissioned the report. I do not know what instructions the person writing this report was given. Maybe there was a misunderstanding of what it was that was to be done. But I must ask why this report was done in the first place, because it set about to set aside the resolution of this place and to set aside the direction that the minister gave. Mr Speaker, I find that totally unacceptable.

I have to say that for some reason the minister did not insist that his directive be put into place. That report was tabled in this place by the minister, so he must have known that somebody in his administration had taken a course directly opposed to what this Assembly resolved and directly opposed to what the minister himself directed; yet he tabled it in this place with no comment and, presumably, tacitly endorsed the findings of the report. In fact, I think it was more than tacitly endorsed; I think he explicitly endorsed the findings. I find it inexplicable that the minister, having conveyed a specific direction to his administration, should then accept a report that is directly contrary to that direction and without comment-in fact, by endorsing it-table it in this place.

That is where it seems to have gone off the rails. In my view, the public servant involved should have been given a solid rap across the knuckles and sent away to redo it, to come back with a paper that explained how the resolution of the Assembly and the direction of the minister were going to be put into place. I find that a little inexplicable; but whatever transpired and however the minister was persuaded that this report had some value in the context of the direction that the Assembly had given, it now seems to have become policy, directly contrary to what the resolution of this place required.

I think that it will take very little to rectify the situation. It requires the minister to do nothing more than to go back to his office and write to the public official who is specifically named in the directive, saying, "You got it wrong; rectify it." Nothing further should need to be done by the minister or by the members of this place. But I have to say that it would appear that there is need for a further resolution of this place to ensure that our earlier resolution is put into place. I find it inexplicable and the outcome is, from my viewpoint, totally unacceptable. I repeat that it would not require much to fix it. It is entirely within the realm of the minister to summon the public servant involved and say to him, "You have got it wrong. Go away and implement, first of all, the resolution of the Assembly and, secondly, the directive that Mr Moore and I gave you." It is as simple as that-we do not need to argue about it-and we should not have to debate this matter further in this place.

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