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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4333 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

When we sifted through the evidence, the 138 submissions and the detailed responses that the officers brought back, we could see that in each case they had at least listened and offered some answer. The problem we confronted, when the committee began to hear from the residents, from developers and from the PALM officers, was that the people concerned had not had sufficient time to work through the detail of what PALM was offering and how the different compromises had been made. They found areas where they thought that the compromises had gone too far, or had not acceded to their demands.

On top of that, PALM put forward a very practical and logical solution to the process of development and redevelopment within the affected area. It turned out to be, in fact, something that they had been asking developers to do already and it has happened in a couple of development projects. These are the section development plans. They are a very new concept. When we tested the idea with local residents, with the MBA, with the HIA, and with the various people who presented before the Planning and Environment Committee, there was a broad consensus that they were a very good idea.

However, a range of very intelligent questions were put, in terms of: Who would have a say? What rights would they have? How would developers' rights be determined? How would the development plan have any status? What good was it if it was developed, let us say, with 20 current residents of a particular section, and then a year later 10 of those residents had passed away or chosen to live somewhere else? What then with the section master plan? Did it still hold? Did anybody have a right of veto? Should it, in fact, be the sort of thing that Mr Moore was talking about - that no section master plan should proceed if somebody did not want development to happen?

These are still unanswered questions which may never have a full and absolute black-and-white resolution. When we heard the intelligent questions that were being put and the concerns that were being raised against the background of a broad consensus, it came back to the same answer for us as a committee. Here is a clear challenge for government to rise to. Here is a very clear set of genuine concerns that are driven by people who have rights, but who also recognise that time is not going to stop; that suddenly their blocks are not going to be of interest. Of course they are. There are also the concerns of people who have already invested in the area and invested considerable sums of money in anticipation of being able to develop, but not wanting to develop against a background of hostility, of court cases, of claims and counter-claims. They are no more interested in causing trouble in those areas than are residents inherently interested in causing conflict. There were two very well thought out positions with years of experience and concern driving them, and a lot of very practical examples on the ground of where things had gone wrong and where things had gone right.

Married with all of that is a set of other concerns which may forever be insoluble, and they are aesthetic concerns. Some people hate some blocks, some people love some blocks, some people want a particular streetscape, and other people want a different streetscape. Those sorts of things will always need a bit of room to move and a bit of concession on all sides. The very fundamental issues that were raised by the community representatives, by individuals who live in the area, by the developers, by the Master Builders Association and by the Housing Industry Association, as mapped out in our report, I think are things that could fruitfully be looked at in far greater and more careful detail.

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