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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4893 ..

Clauses 12 to 16, by leave, taken together, and agreed to.

Proposed new clause 16A

MS HORODNY (10.02): I move:

Page 5, line 17, after clause 16 insert the following clause:

"Insertion

16A. After section 31 of the Principal Act the following section is inserted:

Public consultation

31A. (1) Before varying the Plan under subsection 32(1), the Authority shall cause to be published in the Gazette, and in a daily newspaper, a notice -

(a) stating that copies of the proposed Plan variation, together with an explanatory statement and copies of any other documents considered by the Authority to be relevant, are available for public inspection and purchase during a specified period of not less than 42 days at specified places; and

(b) inviting interested persons to submit written comments about the proposed variation to the Authority at a specified address and within a period of not less than 42 days.

(2) The Authority shall make copies of the proposed Plan variation, the explanatory statement and any other documents referred to in paragraph (1)(a) available for public inspection and purchase during office hours during the period, and at the places, specified in the notice.".

Mr Speaker, this amendment relates to the provision in the Act for defined land. Once an area of land is declared to be defined land in the Territory Plan the Planning Authority is able to approve subdivisions of that land without any need to go through the normal plan variation process. There is, therefore, no public notification or consultation process on what happens on defined land, which to us is quite contrary to the principle in the rest of the Act that development applications should be publicly notified. The public can only guess at whether the Planning Authority is correctly approving subdivisions of land in accordance with the planning objectives for that land that may have been set some time ago when the land was first defined.

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