Page 5453 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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The fact is that there are ample opportunities for professional bodies to put their views to the Planning Authority, either in the context of public consultation or at any other time. There is really no support or justification for a statutory committee.
The Government stands for smaller government rather than bigger government, and Mr Jensen wants to put in more layers of bureaucracy. I am not even sure that he is quite clear what he wants. The amendments, which now I hope will not be debated shortly, suggested that this committee be of five members, no more than five members. Then he proposes, amongst those five members, that the following disciplines be represented: Town planning, architecture, engineering, landscape architecture. So, he has covered four of his five members. He asserts, however, that this is for the community. Well, the committee proposed here is not for the community. He spent 10 minutes talking about how the community needs to be represented in a body that he does not intend them to be represented on. So, there is quite a deal of confusion about what he wants.
We know what we do not want, and that is unnecessary layers of government. We are not talking about advisory committees to the government on functions where it is appropriate; we are talking about a major part of government business in this Territory that once again we see evidence that Mr Jensen simply wants to clog up.
MR COLLAERY (6.37): Mr Speaker, I rise to accept philosophically Mr Kaine's comments. Of course, decisions taken in Alliance configuration are not necessarily explicable in a single party context. Of course, Mr Kaine is correct in saying that, whilst a concession may have been made in a coalition arrangement, it may not necessarily apply freed of those arrangements. We frankly concede that, although this proposed committee was in the final draft.
Let us go back to the whole basis of it. The original basis was to ensure that the authority itself got some specialised planning advisory support. It was meant that way. The community, when it was first proposed, thought that that body would supplant community consultation, and the Rally at that stage got cold feet on the idea in its own Bill in government. But when the concept of the committee was refined in the first, second, third or umpteenth draft that we all saw, we saw this as a manner in which those professionals, who often feel frustrated about their input and do not necessarily belong to community groups, could advise the Government directly. It was on that basis, and pursuant to the Rally's platform, that we pursued this.
My colleague Mr Jensen reminds me that we made a policy decision a week ago or more, under some pressure, to add landscape architecture to proposed clause 49G(d), but we omitted at the same time to increase the membership to seven as we intended. Let the record show that; that
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