Page 3090 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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With master planning, I was very glad to see the government responded to our calls for funding for additional master plans to be undertaken each year. The master plans are focused on town centres, rural villages and transport corridors. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the prioritisation of which areas need master plans as a matter of urgency as there are many places across Canberra calling for them. I understand that ACTPLA does not have the resources to do them all at once.
In terms of rural villages, the master planning needs to be undertaken in conjunction with planning for tourism, as maintaining our rural villages is more complex than simply the planning infrastructure. There is still the outstanding issue of how best to deal with local planning and consultation and how to replace the neighbourhood planning process. I understand some of the government’s reluctance to reinstate that process, but we cannot totally leave a gap there. People are concerned about what is happening in their suburbs, and we need to have some progress on that.
As to transport corridors, I note there seems to be some confusion about what exactly a transport corridor is. This concern should be rectified as a priority. I think all parties in the Assembly agree that we need to be developing higher density, better services and better transport along transport corridors, but it is not clear exactly what we are talking about.
If you look at the territory plan, there are only four areas which are deemed to be transport corridors, and they do not align with the areas that the new minister for both transport and planning has named, and they do not align with the public transport priority routes in the strategic network plan. Now that we have the new directorate which combines planning and transport, I hope we will see some revision of this and some alignment of these in the territory plan in times soon to come. In particular, it would be very good if this issue was clarified so we had a clear policy which we could use for emissions under the lease variation charge.
Looking at supermarket policy, I am still unclear as to how this is being applied and what ACTPLA’s role in this may be, especially for DAs. We have asked questions on notice about small business impact statement requirements for development applications, but it has been quite difficult to find information about what exactly the requirements are and what level of analysis has been done. I am not convinced that our planning system is well equipped to analyse and deal with the impacts at present. This is unfortunate, because there is clearly a fair amount of small business turnover in the ACT. I imagine that some of this is due to new developments being approved inappropriately in some cases. But without clear information, it is very hard to be sure what is going on.
I am also interested in the role of the new government architect, and I would like to say more about it. But, sadly, this is another issue where both the Liberal Party and the Greens put questions on notice and neither of us has received an answer as yet.
The Greens are very supportive of sustainability showcase developments such as Eastlake, and we hope the soil contamination issues can be easily and cheaply resolved both in terms of remediation and gaining fair funding and compensation for
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