Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Madam Speaker, the Greens will be supporting the Surveyors Amendment Bill 2024. We are satisfied that the proposed measures are sensible and appropriate. This response will be brief, but not quite as brief as some of the public comments to the bill, all of which were also very supportive.
The delay of the automatic repeal of regulations by two years is wise given that further amendments will be required at a later date. The administrative burden of going through this process multiple times would be unnecessary.
We also support the amendments allowing for disciplinary orders to be published in the Surveyors Register. I note that the orders that are not a suspension or cancellation of registration are required to be removed from publication after a period of three years. While this does not seem unreasonable, I note that the Geospatial Council of Australia, in their submission, called for consideration of removing this provision.
Through you, Madam Speaker, could the minister elaborate on the purpose of the removal of the publication after three years and the reason the government opted not to remove this provision?
The bill amends section 16(2) of the principal act to remove the requirement for a person who is not a registered land surveyor to be directly supervised. It has been put to us that this has never been the practice or intended to be the practice – that supervision must be direct and that this was, in effect, a drafting anomaly.
Section 16(2) currently carries a maximum penalty of 200 penalty units, which is a substantial sum. The amendment bill, however, does not contain any provisions for retrospective application, validation of decisions made or any provisions otherwise ensuring that a person cannot be taken to have committed an offence due to a lack of supervision.
Through you, Madam Speaker, can the minister please outline the reasoning for this? Is the government’s position that they will not be pursuing fines for any relevant contraventions of the act?
I note the background paper for this bill identifies a trend in non‑compliant surveys. In the review’s own words, in the last five years the Surveyor‑General has observed an increase in non‑compliant surveys of land detected by the audit and investigation programs conducted under the act, and a lack of effective supervision, whilst not the sole reason, has been identified as a contributing factor. Of interest is that the lack of effective supervision is only one contributing factor to this trend. Is the minister please able to outline any other issues contributing to non‑compliance and what the government is doing to improve compliance more broadly?
Aside from those questions and points of clarification, the Greens are happy to support the bill.
