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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-09-23 Daily Xml
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UPPER SOUTH-EAST DRAINAGE SCHEME

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:23): I bring to the attention of the house today a matter that has been troubling both me and my constituents for a considerable time. I mention it because of my frustration with the slowness of the processes of government and the inability of the minister for the environment to address this matter, which is impacting on some of my constituents greatly, and I will relay a story to illustrate that.

I refer to the drainage scheme in the Upper South-East in my electorate, and I remember voting against the bill that passed through parliament in December 2002 which gave the government power to compulsorily acquire a strip of land through farmland to build the drain. I argued at the time that we had been building drains in the South-East for well over 100 years without the need to do this, and I did not believe that we needed it then.

Through this process we now have landholders with titles that they cannot trade, because the government agency responsible for acquiring this strip of land for the construction of the drain will not finalise the titles. So, the owners of those titles cannot do with the titles things that they want to do.

I wrote to the Minister for Environment and Conservation well over 12 months ago, and I received a response from him on 18 August 2008. In the penultimate paragraph of his letter he said, 'The land acquisition process does not affect the sale of whole allotments and impacts only on dealings which involve the subdivision of land,' which is the very matter that I had raised with him in my earlier letter. I wrote back to the minister on 22 September (12 months ago yesterday), pointing out that that was the exact problem; it was where the owner of the land had wanted to subdivide.

Where the drain went close to the boundary of a piece of land and went through part of the next-door neighbour's boundary, the landowners came to an arrangement whereby they wished to swap the little bits that were cut off by the drain so that they were added to a larger portion of land for ease of management. That is relatively common, and landholders have been trying to achieve this and were prevented from doing so. As I said, I wrote back to the minister on 22 September pointing that out to him.

On 17 December, I again pointed out a particular case to the minister where a landholder had a number of sections, or titles, that he wanted to sell. The drain ran through them and there had been compulsory acquisition. In selling the properties, he wanted to reconfigure the titles because a public road ran through the properties. He divided the properties such that they would form one farm to the north and one farm to the south of the public road, and he wanted to sell them in that manner. He thought that would make the properties easier to sell; that it would be more attractive for someone who wanted to purchase them, rather than having parcels of land on each side of the road, which is a perfectly reasonable objective for him to pursue.

This person subsequently sold the properties but there has been no ability to settle, because the titles have not been finalised where the drains have gone through. Also, one of those properties has subsequently been sold. So, it has been sold twice in that period of time and still the original settlement cannot be settled. The subsequent settlement cannot be finalised and the original owner, who has moved on and is now farming in New South Wales, still has not been paid for the original sale. Off the top of my head, I think I am talking about something in the order of about three-quarters of a million dollars that is owing to this man. He cannot get access to those funds, because the state agency will not get off its backside and fix up those titles where the drains have gone through.

As I said, I wrote to the Minister for Environment and Conservation on 17 December (that was the final letter I wrote), and I still have not received a response. When my office contacted the minister's office in mid-December we received an acknowledgment of my letter. My office has been in regular contact with the minister's office ever since, seeking a response to the last two letters that I sent and, more importantly, seeking some action so that landholders in my electorate who have had drains put through their farms and whose titles have been made such that they cannot settle on land transactions can get on with their life. This has been going on for three or four years—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! That is sufficient, member for MacKillop. You have taken it too far.

Time expired.

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