Page 1093 - Week 03 - Thursday, 18 March 2010
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cop the equivalent of a court cost and legal costs and everything else on top of that? What that will do is stop honest people challenging a decision that they should be allowed to challenge.
That is not to suggest necessarily that it is in the act that nobody gets these costs. It should not be an automatic cost attributed to the appellant. There should be another decision-making body. And, when we consider making an appeal against the planning decision, we need to work out what the consequences of that are. So what we have got to weigh up is whether we have got the money to actually go to the ACAT and put a case versus having the amenity of our particular area destroyed forever and that is the end of it.
We need not penalise these people, and I do not want the community out there to think that this Assembly is going to be passing laws which, in a sense, disenfranchise the honest person in the interests of whacking a walnut with a massive great hammer. It does not work for me; I am sorry. I commend the legislation to the Assembly.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Land and Property Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (11.11): I will just close the in-principle stage, and I thank members very much for their contributions to the debate. I acknowledge that both Mrs Dunne and Mr Rattenbury have foreshadowed amendments, and I will be quite pleased to go to those in the detail stage.
But just to summarise this bill, it is the 24th bill in a series of legislation that concerns the justice and community safety portfolio. The bill contains amendments to clarify and simplify the operation of legislation and improve existing law to provide more robust protections for the people of the ACT. Other amendments in the bill respond to initiatives of both the Council of Australian Governments and the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General.
Notably, this bill produces a series of amendments to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act to restore the appeal processes that existed in the former Administrative Appeals Tribunal in relation to planning appeals. I will go to this in some further detail in relation to the detail stage and Mr Rattenbury’s amendment. But at its heart, it needs to be understood that the series of amendments to the ACAT essentially simply establish a status quo that it was believed would be transferred to the ACAT and is not a new policy position or a new policy setting. It really is an attempt to restore an appeal process or arrangement that applied under the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and which inadvertently was not carried across to the ACAT.
The amendments do, however, respond to industry concern that the introduction of the ACAT changed the process—and they certainly did—in a way that was not intended. The government simply wishes to restore the former appeals process for planning applications to ensure certainty in relation to the planning process while protecting the public’s right to object to inappropriate development.
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