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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 737 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

These provisions have a demonstrated capacity to ensure that decisions are made in accordance with the law and not contrary to it. They have not been abused and they have not resulted in a flood of litigation. The costs and complexities of taking a matter to the Supreme Court have ensured that such cases are not undertaken frivolously. To quote Stein:

Open standing provisions are not to be feared but should be welcomed as an aid to enforcement. They have the capacity to ensure that administrators carry out their duties.

My Bill also includes another minor amendment to the Land Act that corrects what has been acknowledged by the PALM officials as a drafting error in the description of persons who are eligible to lodge appeals to the AAT against a decision on a development application. The Land (Planning and Environment) (Amendment) Bill (No. 4) 1996 changed the whole planning appeal system so that only those persons who were substantially and adversely affected by the decision could lodge an appeal. At one point the Bill stated that appeals can be made only where the rights of the person are substantially and adversely affected by the decision, when it should have said "interests", which is the word used in other parts of the Bill. Because the word "rights" has a particular legal interpretation that differs from the word "interests", it is important to clear this up as soon as possible, before it leads to confusion in appeal cases.

In making this minor amendment, I should point out that this does not mean that we support the Government's changes to the appeal system that were made at the end of last year, which in our view severely limit the ability of the community to question the merits of particular development applications. If we had thought we had a chance, we would have undertaken broader amendments to the Land Act to open up the opportunity for third-party appeals; but, given that the Labor Party supported the Government's restrictions to the appeals system, we knew the numbers were against us at this point in time.

In conclusion, the Government argued at the time of introducing its amendments to the Land Act last year that it wanted to eliminate trivial appeals that might hold up development; but the changes it has introduced to the Land Act and the AD(JR) Act have gone far beyond this, to really limit the ability of the public to ensure that the Government and its administrators fully carry out their legal responsibilities under the Land Act. This is just indicative of the Government's general reluctance to have its planning decisions questioned by the public. What this Bill is about is establishing a legal mechanism for keeping the Government honest and publicly accountable in the way it handles planning matters in the ACT. I commend this Bill to the Assembly.

Debate (on motion by Mr Humphries) adjourned.

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