Page 3292 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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forthcoming later this year—but I thought it would be opportune just to make a number of brief comments.
This is a well-considered and well-constructed report and it seeks to identify those issues of most significant concern raised by a range of individuals and organisations with an interest in the planning system here in the ACT. I commend Mr Gentleman and his committee, Ms Porter and Mr Seselja, and the committee secretariat on the very intense period of work they have put into putting this report together and their ability to attract what was a very wide range of submissions. This report will certainly serve a very valuable purpose in further informing the government’s development of the draft legislation.
The draft legislation itself is the most significant reform to planning legislation in the ACT since self-government. We have the opportunity to put in place the national best practice model for development assessment, and that is what we are doing. We will be the only jurisdiction in the country to have that national best practice model in place, virtually in its entirety, and that is a real step forward for the territory. I think all sides in this debate have recognised the value of that.
I want to restate what I believe is one of the fundamental principles that the committee has indicated it supports in its report: the notion that it is absolutely critical in a planning and development assessment system that maximum community input is gained early in the process in determining what the rules are in determining what the policy is for land use. That is fundamental to democracy, because land use is about granting rights from the collective, from the community as a whole, to individual property owners as to their ability to use that land and to get financial return from that land. That is where community involvement is most essential.
This legislation sets out very clearly that when it comes to policy setting the involvement of the community is crucial. What it also says, though, is that once the rules have been set, once everyone has debated that and a process that has involved the legislature, the executive and the community as a whole has occurred, that is the time we need to talk about how those rules apply and what are the opportunities to seek review of the detailed issues around the implementation and the application of those rules. That is where I think Dr Foskey’s criticism comes in about removal of third party appeal rights and so on.
The government is proposing to remove third party appeal rights only where someone agrees to put forward a development application that is completely consistent with the quantitative requirements of the territory plan. So when someone says, “Yes, I will put forward a proposal that meets the quantitative requirements of the territory plan in all of its regards, down to the last detail,” we are saying that that issue should not be subject to third party review because they have agreed to play it by the rules in a very explicit sense. I think that is a fair and reasonable approach.
What we are saying, though, is that where someone says, “No, we don’t want to abide by the black-and-white quantitative measures that might be in a development code”—in a residential area, for example—“but we want to create a more innovative project, we want to push the boundaries a bit,” the planning system can allow for that, the development assessment system can allow for that and those issues can be taken on board. That means that, because it is entering into an area of more subjective judgment, there is the
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