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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (23 October) . . Page.. 3997 ..

MRS DUNNE

And then enter Mr Corbell. The minister seems to have received advice that land around Coppins Crossing is the most suitable urban capable land. I say he "seems to have received"this advice because he has not taken this place into his confidence. All we know of his thinking is what he has done in this disallowable instrument. What he has done is excise a small number of blocks from those which were originally designated 99-year leases and turn them into 20-year leases.

With the stroke of a pen he has adversely affected the lives and the livelihood of several generations of two long-standing families of the ACT-two families who were burnt out not by one fire but by fires in two successive summers. During two successive summers disastrous bushfires moved through these people's properties. And that instrument, by a single stroke of the pen, singles out the two family holdings. It takes away their right ever to apply for a 99-year lease and substitutes only a 20-year lease- a 20-year lease which, under the current expiry arrangements, is worth next to nothing.

I ask members to consider whether this is just. I ask: is this the act of a government which is interested in social justice? I wonder what the motivation of the minister is, and I can only go to his publicly reported statements. On 9 August on Stateline he said that he was doing this because he had to act prudently and protect the revenues of the territory. It is interesting that really what this boils down to is sort of a role reversal. We are from the Liberal Party and we are the ones who are usually talking about fiscal rectitude. The Labor Party is the party of social justice. They are the ones who are talking about a fair go for people, planning for people-all of that rhetoric. But today it seems to be the other way around.

This minister, Mr Corbell, is concerned primarily about the revenues of the territory. The Liberal opposition is asking this place to remember that there are people involved here. Generations of people who have made a commitment to the ACT are having their rights to property resumed. I come from the party which largely built Canberra. I come from the party whose leader, Robert Gordon Menzies, promised lessees that they would receive just treatment if their land was taken over for public purposes, that if their land was taken over for urban expansion they would be compensated.

The territory is bound to just terms by the self-government act. Mr Corbell, as an agent of the Labor government, is attempting to act outside these principles. We cannot reward his greed and if we do we will set a precedent. How many other lessees, both rural and urban, will have their lives and their opportunities to maintain their property change with the stroke of an administrative pen?

Mr Corbell, as an agent of the Labor government, says he is protecting the revenues of the territory. If he succeeds in turning this land from its present use of rural to residential, the territory stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in land sales, land tax, rates, stamp duty-the whole lot-but there is nowhere in that hundreds of millions of dollars for a couple of millions of dollars for the farmers who will be displaced. Won't there be a little cash to spare out of this great windfall to see that the families who previously farmed this land can set up elsewhere without loss? This is what it is about, Mr Speaker. It is about allowing them to get on with their lives without loss. And isn't this what a just society should be doing? If we do anything else, we would be in breach of the

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