Page 124 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 May 1989
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and, having looked at that, to make a couple of points about the experience concerning the house in Barton and its demolition. I do not believe it is widely understood that there are in existence some real heritage controls in the ACT.
First of all, there is the Nature Conservation Act which protects the natural heritage of the ACT. It is a very important piece of legislation. It is not as well known that in January this year there was an amendment to the Building (Design and Siting) Ordinance which requires the Interim Territory Planning Authority to refuse approval of work, and that includes demolition, if the building is of heritage significance and if approval would not be in the public interest.
I do not believe that amendment to the ordinance is well known and I think it is worth while pointing out that it does exist. It places some requirement on the ITPA to have regard to heritage issues. As a result of that, the ITPA consults the Heritage Committee on applications in heritage-sensitive areas. So the ACT does have some control over the demolition in particular of heritage, and in many ways that control is more than exists elsewhere in Australia.
The great difficulty of course - the problem with which we are confronted here - is that the ordinance and the ACT Heritage Committee's examination come into play only when there has been an application for development. I think that is very much in a reactive mode rather than everybody understanding that there are these rules which exist and that this is how they will be applied. The contrary happens; once there is an application for development, that legislation comes into play, and I think that is what we have to change.
We need to make sure, for instance, that there are integrated planning and heritage Acts or perhaps one piece of legislation. Those two aspects of planning and heritage must work together - one to protect the other and so on. As I said before, we also need to set up the ACT Heritage Committee with its own legislation which would give it some real power. I believe it would also be desirable to establish a task force to advise the Heritage Committee on what might be included in the register of heritage in the ACT.
But, of course, we would need then to require that the task force invite the public to nominate places, assess proposals, conduct hearings and so on so that it is all done in the public arena. This is not something that should take place behind closed doors. I would also be asking the Interim Territory Planning Authority to investigate the order in which developments might be permitted so that they would have to identify special conditions for areas of quality but not of heritage significance and demonstrate how the Territory Plan would show all of that so the people
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