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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4332 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

PALM officers undertook - we could see this from the material that was presented to the committee - a very thorough and extensive consultation process. There were 138 submissions received. There were endless meetings with individuals and with members of community organisations and residents associations. It is clearly noted throughout all the documentation that PALM officers went out of their way to ensure that any information that was required by the community, by the developers and by all concerned was readily provided, readily responded to and readily explained. So, as I say, one can readily understand why a member of the Government may choose to say, "Look, for heaven's sake; this has been going on for months and months. Let us draw a line in the sand and call an end to it". It would have been quite tempting for the committee to do that and then to say, "It is your problem now, Government; deal with it".

However, when one listened carefully to what the residents were saying, it was not so much that what was being proposed by PALM to the Government was wrong; it was simply that they had not had the opportunity to see for themselves how the officers had responded to their submissions, where they had taken into account what they had said, and where they had rejected what they had said. What is interesting about that is that that is a persistent pattern that we hear about consultation processes all over the ACT. It is not so much that people complain that they are not spoken to or are not consulted with; it is that they do not know what happens after they have been consulted with and talked to. They cannot see the end product of their involvement; so they become suspicious, they become concerned and they very often become disillusioned.

That is why I began my response to this report by suggesting that this report actually offers a clear challenge to the Government. What we heard quite clearly from residents was their basic demands, and it all boils down to one word - certainty. Someone who has lived in their house for 40 years and wants to stay there for another 20 wants to know that the amenity of that house is not reduced. They want to know that they are not going to be overshadowed, that they are not going to have a huge wall right up to their back fence, that they are not going to have their privacy invaded, and that they are not going to find that they suddenly live in a street without any trees.

When this proposal was put to PALM officers, PALM said, "Yes, fine; we can deal with that. The urban amenity code is exactly for those sorts of issues. That is exactly why we have an urban amenity code". Various members of the community, either in individual submissions or through the residents association, then pointed out details in relation to the urban amenity code as circulated in August. PALM officers took those comments into account and tried to build in the certainty that an individual who may choose to stay in their own residence would need to be assured that although development was to happen they were not necessarily going to suddenly feel that they had no place in that street any longer.

The urban amenity code was also applied in relation to streetscape for major developments. Not only were the residents' individual requirements thought about; so were the requirements of people who wanted to develop major units, flats, or blocks of two-storey units, as is allowed in the area. The lessons from B1 were taken and the modifications to the urban amenity code were put through, to ensure that the walls of units that present to the street, for instance in Torrens Street, that some people object to, were not to be repeated.

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