Page 4325 - Week 13 - Thursday, 4 December 2014
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There is another recommendation, recommendation 11, that I would bring to members’ attention. One of the submitters said that some owners had prior knowledge of the scheme before the details were released on 28 October; therefore, with that knowledge, they took the option to knock down. And why wouldn’t you? If you knew that you could carry the cost for the time frame, that you could knock down, get the block remediated, keep your block with its full lease intact, get the lease cleared, so that you have a fresh lease with no hint of Mr Fluffy in the paperwork, and you get the government to pay for it, why wouldn’t you? This goes back to the fairness test. Some people have gained from this; others will lose part or all of their block. And we should allow everyone to be treated fairly.
The government has not agreed that that be investigated. The government, in its response, says:
There is no evidence before the Government or the Taskforce that supports that assertion or on which a proper investigation might be founded.
I refer you to the submissions. There is a public submission that says that this occurred, and it should be investigated. They use the cop-out “we’ve got no evidence before us”. Well, there is a submission there. Go and talk to the person and find out what was said. If people have benefited and others are excluded from that same benefit, this government fail in their fairness test. And that would be unfortunate.
There is an additional recommendation beyond the specific inquiry. Recommendation 61 talks about what we do in the long term. In the 90s it was brought to the attention of the then ACT government that in some places, particularly in a street in Theodore, people were suffering from an unusually high rate of cancers, miscarriages and other illness problems. On investigation, it was found they were living on an old sheep-dip site. Sheep dip is arsenic. These people were being poisoned. The then government set in place an excellent process to identify every sheep dip in the ACT and, if it was on suburban land, they were remediated. Some blocks were purchased back. I think the compensation given at the time was $40,000. These people lost no goods but they did lose their homes. What we did was we fixed that problem. I would offer to the government that the government set in place a report—
Ms Gallagher: A different volume—a thousand homes.
MR SMYTH: The Chief Minister says it is a different volume. Absolutely, it is a different volume, but this is a public health issue. And if we do not do that, every time we dig up a block of land—as, potentially, Nudurr Drive is now uncovered; I understand there is asbestos in East Lake, which is slowing down those areas—everywhere we turn over a bit of dirt to start a new block, we seem to find asbestos. We can either continue willy-nilly or we can have an approach. The government response states that it is “noted” but that it is “outside the scope of the measures proposed in the bill”.
I would hope the government comes back and says, “Yes, that’s a process we need to encounter, because we don’t know what happened.” Recently we had the incident
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