Page 1582 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 April 1991
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The most critical issue that faces Canberra at the moment, with reference to planning, is the fact that we not only have new legislation being proposed, but also have a draft plan being prepared for this Territory. To consider this legislation without looking at a reasonable draft Territory Plan is absolute nonsense. We need to have, first and foremost, a strategic plan of what is going to go on in Canberra. That needs to be established and we ought to know, very simply, how much development, where and when.
Those are the issues that are facing us, and those issues are resolved with three main tools: Legislation, the draft plan and the leasehold system. They have to be considered in conjunction, and they have to be worked together. These committees have not attempted to deal with the two together. They have to deal with the two together, and the reason why they have not done it is that they have not had the time. There are a million issues - a million reports to read. The reports were so thick - I can understand it. The point was that they were pushed for time, and I believe that they were pushed deliberately by a cynical Government and a very cynical Chief Minister who is in charge of planning and who is not even here to listen to this debate.
That draft plan for Canberra, as I understand it, is at a stage where they are proposing a system of PLUZ - proposed land use zones. Those proposed land use zones will put a whole new range of bureaucracies over the system we have now. I ask my Liberal colleagues over here whether they want to introduce yet another - and this is what is going to happen - whole range of bureaucracies. (Extension of time granted) There will be a whole new range of bureaucracies in order to facilitate a diminution of the controls in planning that we have in this town. What those PLUZ things are going to do is provide for a situation where they are going to say, "In this zone we are going to have residential" - a nice broad concept - and your next-door neighbour is going to say, "Well, residential is good, but I can make some money out of this. I am going to do what is happening in almost every other city in Australia. I am going to build a set of flats and they are going to be two storeys - because the control mechanism is two storeys - and they are going to contain 12 people, 20 people, or 20 families, or whatever".
That is the possibility that this system offers. We do not want Canberra to be like that. The Executive Deputy for planning says that it is not true. He has seen that plan and he knows that those proposed land use zone systems are part of this plan. He has seen that; nobody else has. He has a conflict of interest and he should have stepped down from the committees.
Let us first, before we do anything else, resolve this committee problem. Let us resolve this problem so that we can attempt to work together, so that when considering this report Mr Berry, Mrs Grassby and I could have been there, along with the other four members. We could have talked
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