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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 11 Hansard (14 December) . . Page.. 3076 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

You will also recall - I ask you to use this in future, to be fair to me - that I also said consistently, at the time, that it still was entirely inadequate in that it did not have a strategic overlay. There was no strategic plan. You know that that is the case. Nevertheless, I recognised that it did achieve a great deal in turning a whole range of NCDC policies - some 1,200 of them, as I recall - into a single overall policy. To ask, after four years of community consultation, that I reject that would have been entirely inappropriate.

The inquiry, as you put it, set a series of targets - public servants, and in particular one public servant. Well, that was its terms of reference. That is what it was asked to do, and that is what it did. You look at the terms of reference again. That is why I took the trouble to read them out. As for targeting a specific public servant, I do not think that is being done there. I asked a question in this house about the public servant who was in charge of this whole area through the period. What the inquiry set out to do was to seek a cultural change. That is why it is, Mr Wood, that it recommended changes at SES level - the spilling of positions and the advertising of those positions. It did not say that people there now who were competent could not apply for those positions and gain them. It said that those positions should be spilled and advertised. It sought a cultural change because it recognised that there was something wrong culturally with the system. That is something that you failed to do, Mr Wood, as Minister, and I think it was a great weakness on your part. But I do emphasise that that weakness came out of the side of your nature that tends to look on the positive side of things, that tends to look for positive things.

Mr Wood also referred to the Territory Plan as being part of the fifty-fifty policy. I think that is inaccurate. I think fifty-fifty was a Government policy and the Government used the Territory Plan to implement that policy. I had a discussion with Mr Townsend on 27 November in which he shared with me some of his thoughts on this report. I made notes of that meeting and I made it very clear to Mr Townsend that I was doing so. He suggested to me that the fifty-fifty policy of the Labor Government was not based on planning concepts at all, but rather on revenue concepts. The Government saw that they could save $56m by 1993-94 in terms of the infrastructure, and it was based on that. There is another very important thing on that issue that I will come back to in a short while.

Mr Wood suggested that this was an unbalanced report. I think the reason he finds it to be an unbalanced report is that he did not understand or somehow missed the terms of reference. If the terms of reference had been much broader his contention would be appropriate. He also went on to say that there was no evidence at all that there had been a pro-developer and anti-resident situation. At the meeting that I had with Mr Townsend, and this was when I said to him that I would be making notes, he indicated to me that when Trevor Kaine was the Chief Minister and was responsible for planning he indicated to Mr Townsend that his role was to make the planning system work for investors, that the applicant should be assisted as far as possible, and that objectors were to be given only the assistance that was required by law. That was the cultural milieu in which the system operated and which needed changing.

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