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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4056 ..

the draft spatial plan, and then at last The Canberra spatial plan with its pull-out planning minister. Sadly, my copy has already lost its planning minister. I hope that is not an omen—or perhaps it is an omen.

We have six publications to get us to a spatial plan. We all puff ourselves up and say how wonderfully we have done—but let us look at the fruits. Let us look at what has happened. When this minister came to office as the planning minister he did so with a great flourish and a planning policy called Planning for people. That contained great eloquent things about how it was going to be fabulous—and everyone would be happy in the Simon Corbell utopia of the new planned Labor Canberra.

It is interesting to note that, some time back, Planning for people was quietly removed from the ACT ALP webpage because again, along with all the failures in planning, the people were forgotten. It really is a bit of an embarrassment that the ACT planning document for the last election was called Planning for people, because the people were forgotten. The processes were there: there were lots of publications and there was all this consultation. But the planners forgot that the people who were being consulted had day jobs, and other things to do with their lives.

On top of all this spatial planning and social planning, we had a whole range of other things. We went through a phase where people would say to me, “I’m just DVP 200-ed out. I’m sick to death of talking about DVP 200.” I think this was the subtle plan of the Stanhope Labor government and of Simon Corbell, its planning minister. It is rather redolent, as I have said in the past, of the days of The rise and rise of Michael Rimmer—a movie about participatory democracy. In that movie there was a consultation and referendum on everything until, eventually, people were so sick of it that they had one final consultation and one final referendum to do away with consultations and referendums. I think this is what was done.

Let us look at the planning activity in the ACT over the past three years, and look at the litany of disasters. The ones that come to mind are St Anne’s Convent being rezoned for aged care persons—eventually, but it took four years. And there was the zoo. For over three years the Canberra National Zoo and Aquarium has been waiting for an allocation of land. There was the spectacle of the western route of the GDE with a 10-metre trench in front of the AIS. As we touched on today, there were the unconscionable delays for The Little Company of Mary—and there was, as I contend, the illegal call-in of the sites in Gungahlin for Coles and Woolies.

Mr Corbell: Mr Deputy Speaker, I wish to raise a point of order. Mrs Dunne has suggested that I acted in some way illegally in determining a particular development application. That is quite disorderly and I would ask you to ask Mrs Dunne to withdraw it.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: I did hear the word “illegal”. Withdraw it.

MRS DUNNE: I withdraw it.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

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