Page 1611 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 8 May 2018
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MR PARTON (Brindabella) (4.53): This bill straddles a number of legislative responsibilities and themes and I will briefly cover a couple of those. The Canberra Liberals will not be opposing the proposed amendments. As the minister indicated when he presented this bill, its intention is to clean up and clarify a few things to improve the functionality of the affected legislation.
I would like to address a few aspects of the bill. First off, there are a few changes to the Nature Conservation Act in relation to development of draft native species conservation plans. As I understand it, the change gives the conservator the option of not consulting some stakeholders during the drafting stage. It is suggested the changes have been made to declutter the existing regulation which requires the conservator to consult on every little change. This may lead to a situation whereby a property owner may be impacted by changes in a draft plan and not be aware of it at that stage. And if that is the case, it is incumbent on the conservator to be as inclusive as possible particularly in circumstances that may have a significant impact on property owners’ quiet enjoyment of their land. I do not believe that it is the intent of the government to dump draconian changes on an ACT landholder and I hope the minister can offer his assurances on that.
There are also some important points in relation to the CRA and SLA; I think for the purposes of brevity I will just refer to them as the agencies. In relation to these, there are a few points that the minister glided over when he presented this bill. And if I may, I would like to make a few suggestions for the minister to think about.
The bill tidies up the assignment of delegations by the City Renewal Authority and Suburban Land Agency to the CEO and from the CEO on to the respective agencies’ authorised persons. While this may sound like a dry and somewhat marginal point of interest, the delegated powers are extremely important as the bill actually empowers the exercise of the agencies’ functions. You might be tempted to think, “So what?” For some, the functions exercised by the subject agencies are extremely far reaching—for example, the power to buy and sell leases of land on behalf of the territory. The purchase and sale of land are vital to the wellbeing of the territory because the agencies’ decisions in this regard can determine, in one way or another, our ability to secure an affordable house, our freedom of choice over what area we might like to live in, the type of structure we might have a choice over or not. In effect our housing future is in many ways determined by these delegates and by the agencies who direct them.
While we have no problem with the amendments in relation to the delegations, we do hope that the delegations will be exercised with transparency, accountability and probity. We do hope the delegated powers will not facilitate any more bargains for the government’s mates, such as those seen in Dickson, and other questionable land transaction practices reported on by the Auditor-General. It would be nice to think the documentation for each land transaction approval would be readily accessible by both sides of this chamber and by the Canberra community, who are the ones paying the price for the decisions arising from these powers.
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