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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3544 ..

back and checked—I read the bill again—and then asked the officials. They said, “Yes, there will have to be a whole lot of heritage guidelines” and, “No, Mrs Dunne. We haven’t really thought about what will be in them except that they will be simpler than the ones we currently have.”

I am not satisfied. I am not going to pass a piece of legislation so late in the life of this Assembly when there is much significant work that still needs to be done, which we will not see and will not have the capacity to scrutinise until perhaps February next year. This is not a good way to make legislation. There are many things that would hang off these heritage guidelines. There is much that will impact on the wider community as a result of what is not being brought forward by this government.

I think the thing most people concentrate on when they think about heritage is how heritage is listed. We have had a whole cavalcade of people—and the minister in his presentation speech—saying that, under the present provisions, we are not doing it very well. I do not think there was an argument with that. The present provisions are now 13 or 14 years old and they have not been well implemented.

It has been said to me that the problem is not with the legislation as it stands but with the way people interpret it. Irrespective of that, we have not been well served by the process of listing heritage in the ACT. As a result of that—and the minister acknowledges it in his presentation speech—there is a huge backlog. There are only 25 historic sites and 250 Aboriginal sites on the interim register. There are 300 historic sites nominated and another 2,500 known Aboriginal places awaiting assessment.

This, of course, is a very grave problem and it reflects badly on many regimes, not just on this present minister. I think that, in many ways, heritage has been the poor cousin in the planning and land management panoply. I think it is incumbent upon all of us here to admit that we could have done better in the past, but changing the legislation does not change the culture of an organisation. At this stage I am not assuaged by the assurances from officials that everything will be better under the new regime in six months time.

I am concerned that, while the executive in this territory is kept in the heritage loop, the Assembly is effectively taken out of it. Reports made to the minister are not necessarily made public, and there are concerns about the level of material that may be kept secret. In the past we have had concerns—not necessarily in the ACT but in other jurisdictions—about information that is kept secret.

My original principal concern rested with part 10, which sets out how we undertake development applications that relate to heritage. A simple reading of the legislation basically implies that what we are setting up is a parallel approval process or a two-stop approval process, to be more precise. A whole range of people have come to me and to other members of the opposition saying, “We are really concerned about this because we are moving away from a streamlined process to something which is much more cumbersome.”

When these issues were raised with the minister we were issued with a revised explanatory statement that has in it a flowchart. The last page is headed, “Proposed revised DA process that will take in heritage.” When I talked to people and asked, “How do we enshrine this in the legislation?” they said, “Don’t worry about it, Mrs Dunne; this

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