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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 11 Hansard (14 December) . . Page.. 3066 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Who was responsible for this complexity? After long and tortuous but serious processes that some of us remember, it was this Assembly which passed both the Land Act and the Territory Plan. The public servants responded - I believe very well in the circumstances - to the processes that we put in place. It was imperative that the Act and the plan be introduced as soon as possible after the establishment of self-government. More time would have produced better outcomes.

But there were also the political circumstances of the day, especially in relation to the Land Act, when the Residents Rally and others successfully moved many amendments making a difficult Act even more difficult. A week ago Mr Humphries said that many of the problems in the Land Act relate to amendments moved by Mr Jensen of the Residents Rally. It was acknowledged at the time that the Act would need considerable refinement, and an Assembly committee worked hard at that. The former Government proposed a number of amendments, and now the board of inquiry makes further suggestions. We must take the time to ensure that now we achieve simpler and more effective legislation.

There is another dominating factor which the board completely ignored. The Territory Plan brought most significant changes to ACT planning. Those changes, and the community response to them, should have been acknowledged and understood by the board before it rushed to condemn the bureaucrats who worked under its provisions. The report's case study 18.7 compares the ACT with Blacktown, a growing local government area in western Sydney with a population of 235,000. The comparison is invalid and evasive. Canberra, too, is a growing city, but the Territory Plan and the urban renewal program saw more than half of new applications directed towards established, not greenfields, suburbs. A valid comparison would have been with an area like Balmain. Did the board fail to comprehend what was happening in the ACT?

The bureaucrats had to deal with not just a difficult Act and a new and significant plan, but changes that brought a vastly increased workload with often controversial and prolonged debate. I know that they performed very well in those circumstances; not perfectly in every case. Not every phone call was recorded, and processes for handling complaints were not always right. There was difficulty with some FOI requests, and the board certainly heard many complaints from the community. Officials are required to work under the circumstances and requirements of the day. Times were difficult, but they performed competently and diligently as always.

Let us look still further at this question of balance. In discussing planning issues the report provides a large number of case studies. Almost entirely, and no doubt accurately, the studies reflect community complaints about the Planning Authority's handling of inquiries, objections and the like. I can accept that, but where are the other case studies? Where is the study of a developer's application which satisfied the quantitative criteria but was nevertheless resisted by the authority until a satisfactory design was achieved? Where is the study, and there would be many, where objectors became satisfied with an eventual outcome? Where is the case study where an objector or group on poor grounds resisted through all of the provisions available?

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