Page 4804 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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I think it is a real shame that this motion needed to be brought to the Assembly today. As Mr Coe has said, this is not the place for the politics of planning. The politics of planning should be about the long-term objectives, the big picture; it should not be about the Assembly trying to be a traffic engineer and working out the consultation issues of places that are just not working for the community. It is not the first planning issue which we have debated in this place this year and, given the current level of government consultation, it is probably unlikely to be the last.
As people may be aware, one of the issues in the Labor-Greens agreement was better neighbourhood planning. We have recently written to the Minister for Planning about a way forward on that issue and proposed a precinct planning process which will be triggered when local planning issues such as this arise, which would lead to a community planning process which would mean that all relevant stakeholders could be involved and hopefully reach a shared understanding and conclusion.
In this case, the government do say they carried out consultation. But as Mr Coe points out in his motion, this was actually before there were residents in the area. The closest neighbours were residents of suburbs far away who would not be affected by the alignment in either direction. They were the residents of Ngunnawal, Palmerston, Amaroo and of course the kangaroos who did not, unfortunately, comment.
The government has said the prospective residents were able to make fully informed decisions about the purchase of property in Harrison and about the proposed road. Although this information may, in fact, have been available, if real estate agents did not point it out, the potential residents would not know because not all potential residents actually know all about the intricacies of the territory plan.
Mr Barr and the government claim that the Land Development Agency’s sales conditions and documentation for Harrison 2 estate 4A-2 indicated the proposed road alignment and the location of its intersection with Horse Park Drive. However, residents have told us that the LDA sale document included a map, in very large scale, which showed it straight, and Elders, the LDA’s marketing agent during December 2005, we are told, had the response simply that the road was a future Well Station Drive, which undoubtedly is true, and that the details had not yet been worked out, which would not lead people to think that the whole thing was done and dusted and that there was no consultation to happen. So it really appears that there was no possibility that the residents could make an informed decision before buying their houses. The information they had was that it was a straight line, with no details.
We do note, of course, that there has been consultation recently but, had the residents not been so active in drawing the attention of the Greens and the Liberal Party to this issue, we suspect there probably would not have been as much consultation. There have been issues with this consultation. As Mr Coe has pointed out, the incorrect email address was provided for most of this consultation time. Unfortunately, it is things like this that make residents understandably very cynical about the government’s aims in consultation, that they cannot even provide a working email address.
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