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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1549 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

The only assumption that can be drawn from that statement in the budget is that this Government has already made up its mind to contract out that range of services and, more importantly, they have locked it in. They have locked it in because they are factoring in savings of $2.3m in the coming financial year. The decision about market testing of those functions and the contracting out of those functions has already been made. The figures show that. We should have concerns that the environmental management and regulation area will be contracted out. These are important functions of government. They cannot be left to the private sector to undertake.

Moving to the Planning and Land Management Group, planning in many respects became an important issue in Canberra when Canberra became the Federal capital. The city is a planned city. Its success, the ability of its various areas to interact with each other, to provide spaces for people to live, work and recreate in pleasant human surroundings, in spaces which are equitable, democratic and part of the public sphere, are all elements of a good planning system. The importance of maintaining a good planning system is emphasised by the need for a strong, effective and efficient planning agency. The Government itself, in its rhetoric, says that it recognises the importance of having a strong, effective and efficient planning agency. But, when you examine the budget papers, what you see undermines those statements. Over the next two years Planning and Land Management will lose 29 staff out of a total staff number of 314. Those are full-time equivalent positions.

Mr Berry: Almost 10 per cent.

MR CORBELL: That is almost 10 per cent, as my colleague Mr Berry points out. That means that PALM is being asked to do more with less. In the budget papers we see in the outputs area in almost every respect a requirement for PALM to improve its targets in relation to service delivery, meet higher targets, but it is being asked to do so with fewer staff, far fewer staff. Interestingly, the Minister has continually said over the past six months that he wants to see PALM more responsive to the demands of developers, more responsive to the demands of those making applications for development. But in these budget papers we now have revealed that the number of applications for new developments, excluding single dwellings, that are to be approved within the statutory time limits will drop from 85 per cent to 75 per cent. That means that a quarter of all new development applications are not expected to be processed within the statutory time limits. For a government that says that it is committed to responding to the demands of the development industry to reduce the target and acknowledge that a quarter of all development applications will not be assessed within the statutory time limits underlies the false economy that this Government is adopting in relation to the Planning and Land Management Group.

Is it any surprise that the target has dropped when the Government has targeted jobs in the agency, targeted the loss of experienced personnel who have the expertise to make the complex professional decisions that need to be made in relation to development applications? Is it any wonder that everywhere you go in this town people tell you that PALM is struggling to cope, that PALM is having difficulties in addressing the demands placed on it? And what is the Government's response? The Government's response is not to recognise the need to resource the agency in an effective way so that it can actually

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