Page 1782 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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development agency and all the bits that hung off that, the statement of planning intent, all of those things in a sense was the easy bit, the ideological bit, the bit where the previous planning minister wanted to put his stamp on it.
I repeat the warnings that I gave on the day that that piece of legislation passed. I said in this place that the test would not be whether or not the legislation passed that day, but whether the system would be any better two years down the track? We know that the planning system was not improved by that large raft of legislation passed in December 2002. Two years after the passage of the legislation we still had the problems of uncertainty about concessional leases, uncertainty about development rights, difficulty in getting development applications approved and changes in lease purpose clauses. These things had not been addressed.
We are now coming to the stage when, finally, they are being addressed, and it is an indictment of the neglect of the previous planning minister and his predecessors. No one is faultless in this. In 1996, a large raft of amendments prompted by the Stein inquiry was passed, while others were not passed. We squibbed it. The former shadow planning minister squibbed it and the former planning minister, who at the time was my boss, squibbed it.
It is a sorry indictment of the process that we have had to wait 11 years to get to this day. There were opportunities. The previous Minister for Planning in 2002 had opportunities to do it, and he passed them up. In November 2002, I moved a motion in this place calling for a law reform commission review of the operation of the land act, which at that stage was more than 10 years old. I suggested that commencement of the Planning and Land Bill should be delayed until that review was completed so that it could all be done as one body of work.
Finally, Mr Speaker, we have that one body of work. It has taken almost five years to get that one body of work. I am standing here today still extremely concerned about the passage of this bill. I have had considerable discussions with Mr Seselja and his office and I note their fairly high level of satisfaction with the process. There has been a review process through the planning and environment committee and Mr Seselja and his office have praised the openness and availability of the planning officials.
But I am still concerned that after five years of work or 11 years of work or 17 years of work, depending on how you look at it, we have in excess of 100 government amendments to this legislation. I fear that we are going to be in the same situation as was referred to in the Stein report by the former head of planning, Mr Jeff Townsend. He described the land act as “a disgrace”; the “worst piece of legislation” he had ever seen; a piece of legislation that was “amended more than 100 times on the floor”. He said, “It is a mess.” I hope that in five years time we are not saying that about this piece of legislation.
Tonight we are confronted with in excess of 100 amendments. Some of those are consequential and fall into particular categories, but the mere fact that we are at this stage in this situation is an indictment of the process. Once again the ministers have failed to get it right. There are some models, and I pay tribute to the previous planning minister. When we passed the Planning and Land Act there were at least two, and possibly three, occasions when all the parties and officials sat around the table and
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