Page 1785 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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I think it is worth going through some of the key aspects of that policy. We talked about establishing a task force of staff to assist with clearing the bottleneck in development applications that has built up since the planning act was changed in March 2008. The minister did not enjoy the speech and has departed the chamber. I think he has gone to consult our policy document. It says that ACTPLA’s customer services branch is congested with a backlog of work and staff who are focused on applications that have been waiting the longest time.
We will establish a small business response team in ACTPLA to provide specialised advice to small builders. This is critical. The planning authority does not engage, as it should, directly with industry. I have visited building sites on a number of occasions and have spoken to builders who say, “I have never in all my years met or seen anyone from ACTPLA.” I think that is extraordinary. These are key stakeholders for an agency and it is only reasonable that the government agency engage directly with them. It appears that in many cases the only time people ever see anyone from ACTPLA is when there is a problem or some compliance issue. Where is the proactivity in getting out there and working out what are the industry concerns and working out how they can better deal with them? That is why we had the small business response team initiative.
We also proposed to appoint a CEO of ACTPLA to implement the necessary cultural and structural change. We will hear from the minister. I am sure that if he does bother to address this point he will say: “Look, there is no need for it. There are no cultural problems within ACTPLA. It is simply that we have to move some resources here or there.” Moving resources here or there is good, because that was another part of our policy which talked about bringing people in to deal with development applications.
We note the presence in the chamber of the former planning minister. That is always welcomed in these debates and we look forward to his contribution. We have heard from both ministers for planning over the last few years that there are no cultural problems within ACTPLA, that what we need is legislative change and that legislative change is going to fix it. As we said at the time, legislative change in and of itself was never going to fix it. It was part of the answer, but we are seeing now, more than one year on, that there are significant other parts to the answer and that is why we were putting a number of those things forward.
It is worth reflecting on what the minister did not cover in his speech about Labor’s record. He talked about keeping the politics out of it and referred to Wollongong as an example of how Labor does things well: “Keep the politics out. Labor has got the middle ground and look at Wollongong. We do not want to be like them, except that they are Labor.” This is the Labor approach to planning, apparently.
We only have to go through some of the immense planning failures—Tuggeranong power station, the data centre, the EpiCentre fiasco, the QEII debacle. This goes to land release but, under the former planning minister, we saw the deliberate undersupply of a residential land release which led to such heartache. We saw the phantom Civic to Belconnen busway project, the approval of a commercial building on the Kingston foreshore in breach of the territory plan and a proposal for a power station with 18 chimney stacks within a kilometre of residential areas.
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