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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (23 October) . . Page.. 3995 ..
Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE
: I move:That Disallowable Instrument DI2003-254, Land (Planning and Environment) Determination of Matters to be taken into Consideration-Grant of a Further Rural Lease-2003, be amended as follows:
Schedule 1 Maximum Rural Lease Term Plan be amended: Blocks 181, 1125, 1171, 1187 Weston Creek and Blocks 181, 1491, 1492, 1493, 1495, 1587 and part 179 Belconnen be amended to 99 year leases.
Schedule 2, page 1 be amended:
After the words 'Belconnen-All excluding Blocks 50', add 181, 1491, 1492, 1493, 1495, 1587 and part 179.
After the words 'Weston Creek-All', add the words 'excluding Blocks 181, 1125, 1171, 1187'.
MRS DUNNE
: Mr Speaker, before I address the substantive issue I would like to address the amendment and explain its provenance. Yesterday afternoon at about half past five the Minister for Planning rang me to discuss this matter, which was originally a disallowance motion. I pay tribute to the Minister for Planning for taking the time to point out the technical difficulties that would have arisen if we had proceeded with the disallowance motion today. I also thank him for offering his staff to assist me with the motion that is before us today.I drafted a motion, which appears on the notice paper, but in discussion with officers this morning we discovered that some of the block numbers that relate to the motion had been inadvertently omitted. The amendment inserts some block numbers so as to ensure that we are all talking about the one piece of land. I do apologise to members for any confusion. The amendment conveys my intention and I thank the minister for his cooperation. He could have sat mum and he did not, and I pay tribute to him for that.
It is, however, sad that we have to come into this place today and attempt to amend this disallowable instrument. It is sad that we have to come here and have an argument about whether, as legislators, we should treat people in the ACT justly and that we should treat them all equally. It is sad and unfortunate that after probably eight years of discussion about rural leases and people's right to tenure we should be in here today discussing the question of whether it is proper to acquire people's property on just terms.
Mr Speaker, what disallowable instrument 254 does, with the stroke of administrative pen, is deprive a small number of our fellow citizens of rights that the rest of us take for granted. If our house were to be acquired by the government for the building of a road or for some other public purpose, we would expect just treatment. We would expect to be able to relocate our home and our lives without loss. But the government, through disallowable instrument 254, is seeking to treat a small number of rural lessees in a way that is different from the rest of the ACT community.
I think we have to go back in history a bit. This story goes back, to my knowledge, to before 1996. In 1996 the then minister for the environment, to whom I was an adviser, set up a rural taskforce to find an equitable solution to many of the problems of land tenure in the ACT. This issue was of considerable importance to all of the rural lessees at
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