Page 259 - Week 01 - Thursday, 17 February 2011
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committee recommended that this rule be removed. This was a recommendation which had clear support from the local residents. It made it a lot easier for the committee to make that recommendation because clearly the local residents seemed to be in favour of it.
The moratorium on section 47 was a lot more controversial, principally amongst the local residents. While the committee has recommended in recommendation 3 that rule 44 restricting the use of section 47 in Turner should be removed from the inner north precinct code, I have put in there a footnote expressing my views that this moratorium should not be removed until after most of the other recommendations of the committee’s report have been implemented. These are the other recommendations which are aimed at improving the quality of residential development and amenities.
I have great sympathy for the people who live there and wish to retain the ambience of the area in which they live. It is a beautiful place to live. It is a very difficult decision. Not all the land owners support the moratorium. The other thing that makes it difficult is the lack of clear intellectual justification, the lack of a clear reason for it. There has been talk of heritage listing, but that has never been pursued.
I believe that if the committee had supported the moratorium at this time it would only be postponed because inevitably in another five or 10 years time—not too long a period of time—the pressure would have been there to revise it again. I support the removal, but I believe this removal should not happen until after the other recommendations of the committee, which are aimed at improving development in the area and in fact throughout the ACT, have been implemented.
I cannot speak at great length on all the recommendations because I only have a quarter of an hour. Recommendations 5 and 6 talk about working on the residential codes. It was the universal view of some submitted correspondence to the inquiry that the codes were complicated and it was not easy to see the distinction between the different zonings. They just felt that either they did not understand them or they did not do what they should do or a combination of both of those. The committee strongly felt, in recommendations 5 and 6, that we should be looking at these zones. I note that they were part of the draft territory plan variation 303, which I understand is undergoing considerable rework within ACTPLA. I look forward to seeing its re-emergence to the light of day in a new and better form. I hope that the committee’s comments will be relevant to that.
Moving to recommendation 7, this is a recommendation which I also hope will be part of the reworking of the draft territory plan variations 301 and 303. Part of the Greens’ submission to 303 was that ACTPLA actually look at models of design and construction quality assessment. There are some of these in Australia and there are some internationally. The universal comment of the public is that they are not against greater urban intensification. In fact, they recognise the reasons for it. But what they are against is poor quality, poorly designed and poorly constructed urban redevelopment—urban redevelopment which does not respect the existing houses and the existing neighbourhood.
We think we should be able to do better than what is happening at present. So recommendation 7 is based around that. We have got to be able to do better. Other
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