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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 731 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Unfortunately, the defined land provisions have allowed planners not to worry too much about the initial planning of greenfield areas, because they know that they can fix things up as they go along or they just leave it to the developers to come up with plans that suit them, but not necessarily the existing residents. As I have illustrated, that can have significant impacts on residents who move into these areas based on certain planning expectations that are later undermined.

My bill seeks to remove the defined land provision from the land act, but there is a transitional issue about what to do with areas that are already defined. I accept that developers who have bought defined land have a reasonable expectation that the defined land provisions will apply to their development. I have therefore allowed the defined land provisions to continue to apply to land that has already been sold by the government. However, for other areas of currently defined land that are still owned by the territory, the government will in future need to make any changes to their planning through the normal plan variation process.

Debate (on motion by Mr Humphries ) adjourned to the next sitting.

ACT Forests-involuntary redundancies

MR BERRY (10:40): Mr Speaker, I move:

Mr Speaker, this motion arises from a litany of attacks by this government on workers in the ACT government work force. That is not something that is new to the ACT. It is something that, regrettably, we have been forced to tolerate. But our suffering is nothing compared to that of the workers who have been put under enormous pressure by this government, which is committed to the doctrine of "public bad/private good". We can go back to issues such as the tips being privatised and CityScape being privatised. Mr Moore's botched announcement in recent times about the Totalcare workers who will lose their jobs because of privatisation merely adds to the long list of attacks on workers under the dogma of "public bad/private good".

What does this mean for the workers involved? In the case of forestry workers, I had a letter from a forestry worker's partner who drew attention to the plight of some of the workers. Last week in question time I drew attention to how these people had been scrapped, how they had given long and faithful service to the territory but the government was indifferent to their long and faithful service through wearing blinkers that keep them focused on the bottom line at all times.

Mr Speaker, these workers are people who have given 20 or 30 years of their lives to working in our forests. They are people who throughout their working life have risked their own welfare in the forests of the ACT in protecting the interests of the territory and doing the job that they were provided with. These workers have been recognised for their service to the community, with one being named Canberran of the Year in 1985. As a co-worker then, I recognise the commitment that they have made. Amongst the faces that were outside the Assembly the other day, I recognised many who in my earlier life I saw blackened with the ashes of bushfires as they worked-

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