Page 4411 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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will have to be changed, partly in the territory plan and partly in the precinct codes—and I was going to say with the LDA, but I understand that the LDA may not be around for much longer. But the criteria for direct land sales will clearly need to be updated.
The LDA already has a strong policy, which is to ensure that competition and small business concerns are taken into account before agreeing to direct land sales. We say that these criteria should be looked at: whether or not there is a need for a new supermarket in the area; how any new supermarket will impact on other supermarkets and other kinds of shops in the area; whether the application would undermine another nearby local shopping centre; whether or not another supermarket is actually the best use of the site; whether the development would also deliver other new services into the area; whether this development would mean that people were able to walk or ride to their local shops; and whether the proposed development would complement other businesses and services in the community. For instance, establishing chemists near hospitals is obviously a sensible thing to do, as has happened at the Woden hospital. Other criteria that should be looked at are whether the applicant is a local applicant who would support other local suppliers, and other social and environmental impacts.
I go back to local shopping centres, because they are the key way that the community talks to each other. Notices are put up at the local shopping centres. The local school has the school fete et cetera there. You just do not have those at the town centres in the same way. We know that there are problems with local centres as far as our current town planning policies are concerned. Partly, this is a problem with ACTPLA, which does not really have a good process for dealing with complex planning policies which cover a number of locations.
Touching on Giralang again, one of the issues with Giralang clearly is not the impact on the suburb of Giralang itself, which probably would have been positive with a Woolworths development. One of the questions about Giralang clearly was the potential impact on other suburbs, and whether a large development at Giralang would have been at the expense of some of the other local shopping centres. ACTPLA at present does not have a very good way of dealing with that. I must admit that I cannot propose exactly how it should do that. But I think that is one of the issues that is very difficult to deal with. Dealing with each proposal in isolation is not going to produce the results that we want for the city as a whole.
Clearly, the Greens have always supported neighbourhood planning and looking at what each suburb and each neighbourhood wants in terms of its shopping centre and providing plans for revitalisation.
The other problem is that we are in a capitalist society. Once the land has been leased to the developer, what they do has to be consistent with the territory plan, but once it has been leased, given that it is consistent with the territory plan, the only say that the government then has is in the built form of the development. It does not have a say in whether that supermarket is going to be operated by Supa IGA, non-Supa IGA, Aldi, Woolies, Coles or whoever. After it has been leased, it is just a matter of looking at whether the setbacks are correct and the traffic is going to be reasonable et cetera. Those are clearly not the only things that are important.
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