Page 1602 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 May 2013
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Studies which may lead to an exemption include studies completed under the commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. The approval given under this act may last for more than 18 months. Under the present legislation, proponents may need to keep applying for an exemption from the minister every 18 months even though the commonwealth study is still applicable. This amendment means that the minister’s exemption will last for the same period that the commonwealth study applies.
We hope this will streamline the application process and remove unnecessary administrative procedures. The Canberra Liberals will support this omnibus bill today. We hope that the technical amendments, as well as the two policy changes, will streamline and speed up planning, building and environment processes in the territory.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.35): This is the fourth of the PABLAB or omnibus planning and building legislation bills that have come before the Assembly in recent years. This bill before us today essentially does two key things. Firstly, it makes a range of building and COLA—construction occupation and licensing—improvements. Secondly, it extends the EIS exemption period.
The simple building and licensing improvements include creating certificates of occupancy for completed building work, the creation of electronic certificates for electrical wiring work, creating certificates for completion of gas fitting work, exemption of inspection of electrical lift installations, clarification of the qualification or occupations declared by the Construction Occupations Registrar for some exempt building works or works which may be undertaken without licence and a clarification of the naming of divisions and the definitions of public place under the Public Place Names Act. I imagine this one may have come up when Mt Ainslie lookout was recently renamed Marion Mahoney Griffin View but this bill also makes clear that the minister has discretion on naming divisions rather than an obligation.
Further, amongst the improvements is the clarification that ACTPLA only needs to report to the minister on consultation comments on a draft territory plan variation, not on other comments not provided through official consultation processes. Another is the introduction of a clause to allow our TAMS, as the land custodian, to sign off on development applications for driveways on public or unleased land. Finally in this list is the clarification of the definition of period of extension in relation to calculating fees for extending the time to commence or complete building work.
This bill also covers a small number of technical and editorial amendments which are not problematic. It is worth noting that one of these amendments is the removal of instruments which related to the ACT greenhouse gas abatement scheme. It was a good scheme when it was first introduced, especially given that there were no national schemes of any kind in place. However, the emission reduction targets improved for a number of years but then tapered off far too early. In any case, the GGAS scheme has now been superseded. The ACT now has its own emissions reduction targets set in legislation and we at least, for now, have a federal carbon tax.
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