Page 1779 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (11.57): Mr Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the minister for clarifying a number of issues through his statement on Tuesday.
For the most part, I support the comments made in his statement, including those about keeping politics out of planning at the individual level. At the micro level, at the level of getting involved in individual development applications, I support this wholeheartedly. The recent reforms to our planning system ensure that our development assessment process is at arm’s length from the politicians, which is where it should be. However, this is something which I do not believe can, or even should, happen at the macro level.
At the macro level, I believe that the government, the Assembly and the community at large should stay involved in planning. We should all be concerned about how our city is developing. We need to prepare for an increase in population, an ageing population, to improve our planning around public transport and to plan for the effects of climate change and how to continue to develop with minimum environmental impact.
Given what we know about climate change, and the fact that we know that 72.3 per cent of ACT greenhouse gas emissions come from stationary energy, we know that improving how we design, build and use our buildings is of utmost importance.
As I listened to the minister’s speech on Tuesday, I was thinking: what about climate change? It seemed to be an afterthought in the minister’s statement. I do not have any problems with what he did say, but I am looking forward to seeing some real change, not rhetoric. As he says, climate change changes everything. Given that, I would have expected it to be the first issue in the statement and inform the rest of the statement. However, up until now we have not seen a lot of changes in our planning system which can give us any hope that the ACT could, will or intends to reduce the energy used in buildings and development in the near future or changes that will ensure that the buildings in Canberra are better equipped to cope with the climate in the future. We know that we can build houses in Canberra which do not need external heating or cooling, but the minister’s statement does nothing to make these sorts of houses the norm. We know that we can build six-green-star commercial buildings that use only about three-quarters of the energy of conventional commercial buildings and are more comfortable to work in. Again, the minister’s statement does nothing to advance this agenda.
Priority issues in the Labor-Greens agreement relating to sustainability need to be woven into the territory plan, including ensuring transport orientated development, incorporating better water efficiency measures such as non-potable water pipelines in new developments, and mandatory solar passive design, including street, block and house design.
I hear the minister’s comments that the new, now one-year-old, planning system is going strong, and largely that does appear to be so. However, it seems to be fairly
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