Page 1051 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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Madam Speaker, this committee has been very fast paced, with numerous public hearings and private meetings having already taken place. I am pleased to present these 24 recommendations. I would like to thank the members of the committee for working so collaboratively, and I look forward to the government responding and acting on these unanimous recommendations.
As with all committees, compromise was required. I think all members approached these hearings and this report in good spirit. The majority of our hearings have been conducted by Zoom, except for hearings that involved the ACT government, because they claimed that Zoom was not safe enough for them. Initially, the Chief Minister said he had received advice that Zoom was not appropriate, despite the fact that the committee office had complied with all the ACT government security requests. When pushed, the only advice presented to the committee was a fact sheet from the commonwealth government that advised the committee to do exactly what we were doing with Zoom. Further to this, I note that the Prime Minister is using Zoom. The reason I say this is that I am firmly of the view that Zoom is a better set-up and more reliable and, therefore, would serve the committee better.
I would like to thank the committee staff, Hamish Finlay and Danton Leary, for all that they are doing for the committee. I also want to pass on my thanks to Dennis London and Paul Crowley for all they have done to get the webstreaming working so well. They only had a few days to set up the IT for broadcasting and videoconferencing. They did so and it went without a hitch. Thank you.
Madam Speaker, it is the intention of the committee to present more interim reports. I am pleased that the ACT has this scrutiny measure in place.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.39): I will start by echoing Mr Coe’s comments about how the committee’s hearings have been conducted. I send a big thank you to the Assembly IT staff for getting it all together so quickly, to the committee staff who were involved in this, and to all the members for their flexibility. I strongly suspect that this way of working will carry on into the future—into the next Assembly, which, of course, I am not going to be part of. I think it has some significant advantages, particularly for public hearings, in terms of reducing the hassle for witnesses to come and talk to us. They do not have to come and talk to us; they just turn their computers on.
I would like, however, to make some more comments about the substance of the report because, after all, the purpose of the committee is to make recommendations, to put public scrutiny on what is happening in this COVID-19 world, and to try to make the world a better place as a result of our deliberations. We are going in that direction but there needs to be a bit more publicity. There were 24 recommendations, so I will not talk about all of them, you will be grateful to know. I will just speak on the ones that resonated more with me.
Housing is certainly the area that we most concentrated on in our interim report. We made some really positive recommendations. Recommendation 2 is for the ACT government to remove the current property limit on the land tax concession scheme
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