Page 1561 - Week 05 - Thursday, 15 May 2014
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omnibus planning bills. It consolidates a number of minor policy, editorial and technical amendments to several acts into a single bill. The bill amends the Building Act 2004, the Building (General) Regulation 2008, the Planning and Development Act 2007, the Planning and Development Regulation 2008, the Unit Titles Act 2001 and the Utilities Act 2000.
There are a number of policy areas and I would like to just make a few remarks on each of them. Clauses 4 and 5 of the bill are in the area of responsibilities of building certifiers and they amend section 50 of the Building Act. These clauses restore the general obligation for building certifiers to report any contraventions of the Building Act that they are made aware of during the course of their duties. It means that certifiers will be required to inform the Construction Occupations Registrar of any illegal activity that relates to building work, stop and demolition notices and the occupation and use of buildings, rather than only monitoring a building’s compliance with its development approval.
This amendment restores obligations that were removed in 2007 when the scope of the responsibilities of building certifiers was limited to development approvals. This greatly reduced the capacity of certifiers to act as front-line regulators and undermined the capacity of the government to monitor the quality of new buildings.
We know that building quality has been an area of ongoing concern, so this is a very welcome change. The government has limited resources available for monitoring and compliance so it makes sense that the people that are already out there in the field doing building inspections should have the scope and the responsibility to report on the full gamut of issues that they might encounter in the course of their duties.
Clause 12 of the bill addresses the area of holding leases and amends section 298 of the Planning and Development Act. Section 298 prohibits the transfer of a new crown lease before building and development works are completed. It provides exceptions to this rule, such as holding leases, which are short-term development leases that allow a developer to build public infrastructure. Currently, holding leases only apply for newly subdivided land. The bill removes this restriction and allows holding leases to be granted for the whole of a lease, not just subdivisions.
The removal of the restriction on the use of holding leases to subdivisions will expand the application of an important but uncontroversial part in the process of selling and developing land and potentially reduce delays that would have been caused by the restriction. As such, I support this clause of the bill.
Clause 14 relates to the University of Canberra and inserts a new chapter into the Planning and Development Act. This chapter will ensure that the Planning and Development Act applies to the University of Canberra lease, addressing the historical anomaly that had ensued from the granting of the lease by the commonwealth in 1977. This meant that the UC lease has, up until now, been expressly excluded from standard lease administration provisions as laid out in the Planning and Development Act.
The exclusion meant that there was no workable way for the territory to enforce the provisions of the lease and no way for the lessee to make a lease variation as a
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