Page 1653 - Week 06 - Thursday, 20 May 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I wish to pay a compliment to the other members of the committee, most notably, for the public record, Mr Kaine, Ms Szuty, Mr De Domenico, and my colleague Ms Ellis. Without their support and assistance and that of Mr Rod Power of the secretariat, the presentation of this report would not have been made in the way it has this day, nor would it have been as comprehensive as it is or, I believe, in the interests of the community. I seek leave of the Assembly to conclude my remarks.
Leave granted.
MR LAMONT: I apologise for that, but I think it is important to place on the record my appreciation as chair of this committee for the way in which this committee has operated. I think the free-flowing debate was an example to all other committees, and not only in this Assembly. This is a consensus document; it was unanimously endorsed by the committee. Madam Speaker, I thank you for your perseverance, and I thank the rest of the Assembly for their attention this morning.
MR KAINE (11.21): The chairman of the committee has outlined at some length what is contained in this report. We are almost at the end - and I emphasise "almost" - of a long process of putting in place a plan for this Territory. It is more than four years since the process started, leading to the development of this document. Some of us have been involved in that process right from the beginning, and it has been sometimes a tedious and complex job. It is a great pleasure to see this process coming to its end.
I do not intend to traverse the contents in great detail, as the chairman has already done so. It needs to be said only once, and the chairman has done that very well. I think it is worth noting that even when this document is adopted by the Assembly and by the Executive - and there is still a process to go to achieve that - all we will have is a new baseline. It is and will remain a dynamic document and there will be input from all kinds of people who still see flaws in it and who will want it to change. The necessities of life, as the expectations of our society change over future years, will require that this document be a dynamic document and respond to the needs of the community.
I think we can say that we have a document that is more user friendly than documents that have existed before. There were some 1,100 NCDC documents that governed the planning processes of this Territory up until now, and they have been consolidated into this document, essentially. Any individual can now pick up this document and fairly quickly determine what the plan for the Territory is, and that is a vast improvement on what we have had in the past. That in itself, I think, is a major achievement.
There has been significant community input. We have heard very often that there were about 1,000 submissions made to the Planning Authority after the initial draft was circulated in December 1991, and it was those 1,000 submissions that extended the time required to come up with what we believe to be a final document. Once you have asked people to make contributions, you have to consider seriously what they say. For once, we have seen the community consultation process in action and working the way it should work. Every one of those 1,000 submissions was carefully analysed and summarised by the Planning Authority. The results of that work were submitted to the committee so that we could be informed on what the community had said and what the Territory
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .