Mackey Moana: Unit Titles Bill — In Committee 
Mackey Moana: Unit Titles Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9859] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am happy to stand and take a call on Part 1 of the Unit Titles Bill. I thank the Acting Minister of Housing for his comments. I think he outlined the changes in the Supplementary Order Paper as they relate to the entire bill not just to Part 1. 
Labour would like to put on record our disappointment that we were not given access to the Supplementary Order Paper earlier. I thank the Minister for allowing me to discuss it with the officials and with staff from his office but having received this Supplementary Order Paper only at question time today it has been very very difficult for me to go through what is very technical legislation and make sure that we are happy with everything in it. I have had a talk with the officials who have assured me that these are minor technical amendments. I note that many a career has been ended by minor technical amendments but that is all right—I am prepared to take the officials’ word that these amendments merely clarify the intentions of the Social Services Committee at that time. Labour will be supporting them. However I note that the date on the Supplementary Order Paper is 9 days ago yet it was made available to the Labour Party—and to other parties I assume—only today. I put on record my disappointment given that we are trying to be very conducive to getting non-controversial legislation through the House and that we have supported this bill all the way through. 
I do not intend to labour on Part 1 for very long. It is comprised mainly of definitions. However I will make a comment. There is a major change in the legislation to the definition of a “principal unit” in response to some of the submitters who came along to the Social Services Committee some of whom perhaps did not get exactly what they wanted out of this. The issue we had was whether open spaces could be considered a principal unit under this legislation. Certainly the existing legislation the Unit Titles Act—as the Minister in the chair the Acting Minister of Housing has said it is greatly outdated and was written a long time ago—was very unclear as to whether open spaces could be issued as a principal unit and sold independently of any buildings. 
We were alerted to examples of vineyards orchards and marinas where the subdivision had occurred under a unit title model as opposed to under a land subdivision model which clearly was not the intention of the Unit Titles Act. We had to make a call as to whether we would allow that to continue. Some submitters thought that it should be allowed to occur. In the end the committee decided that in any future developments it should not be allowed to happen. The one example that we thought merited being allowed to remain as a principal unit was car-parks. Clearly car-parks are sold on their own as principal units and we saw no harm in allowing that to continue. But in all those other areas we felt that it was important that open spaces go back to being a land subdivision issue not a unit title issue. 
This is the area where I need a little guidance maybe from other members who will be speaking on this part as to the status of the principal units that have already been created and that are open spaces which in the future will not be allowed to occur. As I understand it they will remain as principal units. They will not be retrospectively voided by this change that we are making today. I see the Minister nodding and I hope that is the case; certainly that was the intent of the select committee. This particular part took up a lot of the committee’s time and I acknowledge to the number of submitters who were adamant that the open spaces should be allowed to occur that we listened to their submissions and we took them under advisement. In the end we thought it was perhaps pushing the unit titles structure into an area where it had previously not been intended to move. In the past open spaces had been allowed to be issued as principal units but that probably was never the intention of Parliament when it passed this legislation many years ago. 
We made a number of other changes to the definitions in Part 1 for the most part simply to clarify the intent of Parliament and the intent of the select committee to make sure that there would be no further confusion as to what we meant in these definitions. In saying that Part 1 with the exclusion of the definition of a “principal unit” was relatively straightforward and I will be looking to take calls on further parts when we get into more of the detail of the bill.