Page 2024 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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created an independent planning authority and therefore there are no politics in planning”. That is bunkum. It is bunkum, because we had the capacity to do this all the time. Ministers can issue statements of planning intent. That is a political action. The minister can call in a development application either to approve or not to approve; and if he does that, that is a political action.
Mr Barr: Have I been doing that regularly, though?
MRS DUNNE: No, this minister is not doing it regularly. The previous minister did it fairly regularly.
Mr Barr: And Brendan Smyth was the king of call-in, yes.
MRS DUNNE: Mr Smyth was probably one of the longest serving planning ministers and there were a number of call-ins that I recall when Mr Smyth and his predecessor, Mr Humphries, were planning ministers where they called it in to stop a development. It cuts both ways. But those things are essentially political acts.
Mr Barr spends his time saying, “I am going to take the politics out of planning because we cannot have another Wollongong and only Labor can take the politics out of planning.” But who were the people who had their fingers in that pie in Wollongong? It was the Labor members and the Labor staffers and the Labor planning ministers who were all involved to varying extents in what was going on. It was Labor’s mess. That is why Wollongong went bad; it was because of the influence of Labor.
So let us not have any of this bunkum about keeping politics out of planning, because this minister is essentially a political bee and, every time he says that he is not interested in politics, it is nothing more than a political ploy on his behalf. He says he wants to keep politics out of planning. At the moment there are a few embarrassments for them.
One of them turned up yesterday in the budget papers, and that is that we have got to roll over funds for the Harrison high school. Why do we have to roll over funds for the Harrison high school? Because of planning delays in the development of the Harrison high school. What we actually have is a minister for education who is also a minister for planning who cannot get his act together to build a school even when he spends his time extolling how much money he spends on school buildings. But what we have is, once again, a minister who would like to distance himself as much as possible from politics when it is convenient for him to do so.
That aside, I think that what we have here is an important issue, an important issue at the local level as it relates to Giralang. But across the board it is an important issue. I think that the issue about the retail hierarchy needs to be looked at very closely by the ACT government and by the ACT Legislative Assembly. While supporting the minister’s amendments, I do note with some irony 2(a):
continue its support for the current retail hierarchy of local, group and town centres in the ACT;
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