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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (23 October) . . Page.. 3998 ..

MRS DUNNE

constitution and we would also be in breach of the moral law and our moral responsibility to the people of the ACT.

Apart from the moral law, I do not want to see us go down the path of attempting to resume someone's land on less than just terms because I think we will pay a very high political price if we do. I also doubt that the territory would win in the courts. In the past 20 years there have been two cases, one in the High Court case of Oldfield and one in the Supreme Court in relation to a property known as Fassifern where Dunlop now stands, and on both occasions the government lost in its attempt to resume property on unfair terms.

In the case of Fassifern I saw the briefs and I actually said to my minister at the time, "Gary, this is a problem. This is going to cause us a problem."The bureaucrats said to us, "Don't you worry, Minister, it's all above board, it's all fine, we will sort it out, everything will be fine."$1.2 million later, plus costs, we got out of that. The territory, because it was greedy, ended up paying much, much more than it would have if they had just resumed the land on just terms.

In addition to that, at this stage there is no reason for the minister to resume the land. He has stated that there is a reason. In a recent publication of the Australian Psychological Society, the chairman of the ACT division, Justine Gregg, reported on a meeting that she had with the Minister for Health and the Minister for Planning about a number of issues, including the trauma experienced by rural lessees who had had their life made more difficult by the resumption of their leases. Some of these rural lessees have never been able to access services through the recovery centre. They have had to pay large sums of money to private counsellors to have their children counselled about the trauma of the fire. This is what it was reported the minister said to the Australian Psychological Society:

The Minister expressed concern for the recovery of these families but he explained the legal and ACT planning constraints that the Stromlo/Molonglo areas impacted by the bushfire were already zoned urban redevelopment.

The Australian Psychological Society said that the minister told them that areas of Stromlo had already been rezoned redevelopment.

I know that what has been done here already has been done by stealth and I just draw members' attention to the map in the disallowable instrument. You have to be pretty smart to even be able to read the map. I have not got my glasses on but I can just make it out. [Extension of time granted.] It was very informative today when I was looking at this map that an officer from the department said, "We can't read those maps. We've got big coloured ones in our office."But the people who are affected by this do not have access to the big coloured ones. They have the little black and white one on the PDF file and it is very hard to see what is actually going on. This is about stealth. This is a minister who told the Australian Psychological Society there was nothing he could do for these people because the legal and planning requirements had already changed the use of the land.

Mr Speaker, unless I have been asleep and unless the rest of us have been asleep, I do not think that is true.

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