Page 47 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 22 February 1994
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My exception to this particular development has nothing to do with whether or not that site should be developed. Of course it should be developed. It is sitting unused. The developer has invested a lot of money in it. He should have the opportunity to build something there and begin to get some return for his investment. My objection is to the circumstances under which that development is planned to take place. We have a Planning Authority which in this case imposed an obligation upon a private land-holder to provide public parking spaces on that piece of ground. That in itself, I believe, is unusual. I know of no other case in the ACT in which a developer has been told that he must provide public parking on a private piece of land that he is developing for commercial use. That, I believe, was unacceptable.
The developer accepted the requirement, but I do not believe that he willingly accepted it, because it carries a very severe financial penalty for him. He has to make an investment to provide those parking spaces. They are not being provided at the public expense; they are being provided by the developer. I believe that it was clearly understood by the developer that if he did not agree to provide these parking spaces at his own expense no development would be approved. I do not believe that the Planning Authority of this Territory should proceed in this fashion.
Having placed an obligation on a private developer to provide public parking spaces at his own expense on his own property, the Planning Authority then proceeded to totally set aside the requirements of our Territory Plan to allow him to do so. There are some major requirements, major specifications, when somebody wants to build on a site in the ACT. Those relate to setback, plot density or plot ratio, and height. In order for this developer to accommodate the requirement imposed upon him by the Planning Authority to put public car parking spaces on that block, the Planning Authority itself sought to vary the Territory Plan to waive all of those requirements. I have to ask the members of this Assembly: Why did we put in place only a few months ago a Territory Plan that imposes on developers, private and public, an obligation to comply with the provisions of that plan, only to have those provisions set aside by the Planning Authority itself? For those reasons, in conscience, I cannot support the variation that was put to the Planning Committee.
I believe that the whole process is suspect, and I believe that the developer should have been allowed to develop whatever he chose to develop on that site - as every other developer in Canberra is - provided he complied with the requirements and the specifications of the Territory Plan. But that was not the case, and all of those requirements were set aside, I repeat, to accommodate a requirement imposed on the developer by the Planning Authority itself. I submitted in the hearing that the Planning Authority could have dealt with this public parking problem in another way. But they looked at no other options. They did not say to the Planning Committee that they had examined any other options for solving the public parking problem at the Kingston shopping centre. I believe that they set about solving the problem in their particular fashion.
I believe - this is only my recollection - that the developer told us that it was going to cost him nearly $2m to provide 82 car parking spaces. That seems to me to be an unconscionable imposition on a developer. Why should a private developer spend $2m, if that is the figure - and I stand to be corrected - or $1m or half a million dollars providing public parking spaces on his block of land?
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