Page 3317 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 18 September 2013
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area we have considerable concerns about, and I intend to make further proposals when it comes to call-in powers in the coming months.
Today I propose that the Assembly sends a message, and I agree with Mr Wall’s comments that this project should not be subject to the call-in powers and that the community should be able maintain their full rights of engagement through the planning process.
Let me turn briefly to the history on consultation and planning law changes, because the issue today is really a planning issue. It is ironic to see Mr Wall standing up for better community consultation on planning and development issues. The Liberals do not have a history of working to improve consultation and engagement on planning. In fact, they have a history of blocking the Greens’ attempts to open up better engagement in the community. When my former colleague Ms Le Couteur introduced a bill in 2009 to expand the community’s rights to notification and review, both the Liberals and the ALP voted against it at that time.
That bill merely proposed a better balance to the right of residents to be informed and have a say in developments that affect them with the need for an efficient planning system. There has been a consistent lack of support when it comes to denying third-party appeal rights in the city and in our town centres. The Greens, again, have been the ones who have consistently fought for those rights of appeal and been voted down by the Liberal Party and the Labor Party combined.
I note, though, that when the government introduced provisions to withdraw community appeal rights at the Kingston Foreshore last year, just as they had done for the city and town centres, when the Greens moved to retain third-party appeal rights for the Kingston arts precinct the Liberal Party supported that, and we certainly welcomed that support. It leaves us in an interesting position where it seems that, if it is a road or a car park or a large-scale office development with no appeal rights it is a free-for-all as far as the Liberal Party is concerned, but when it is the run-up to an election or there is something else going on, it wants those appeal rights back. I look forward to a further discussion about how we find a better policy outcome on this issue of third-party appeal rights because I am not sure where the line lies at the moment.
The other observation I make is that in 2011 the government and the Greens worked together to create a mandatory pre-development application consultation process for proponents of larger developments. This has been a win-win situation for both developers and the community as it has given them the opportunity to work together to improve proposals, saving time and money further down the planning process. However, unfortunately, the legislation does not cover non-residential proposals, and thus the solar farm proposal before us today has no legislative requirement for pre-DA consultation. What we have seen in the success of the legislation that has passed is that where proponents and communities sit down together in advance of the application we see really good outcomes. Certainly the developers I have spoken to that have used this have identified that it has actually saved them money and time because they are able to resolve some of the issues the community rightly raises. They then design their proposals differently and they tend to get things done a lot quicker and more cost effectively.
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