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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 4 Hansard (20 April) . . Page.. 1013 ..

MR HIRD: Such activities, in anybody's language, are abhorrent. The committee recommends that the Government take steps to remind the relevant professional bodies of the need to control and discipline their members in relation to such unsavoury activities.

I would like to thank those who assisted us - from the Minister through to his departmental officers and my colleagues Mr Corbell and Mr Rugendyke - in respect of the delivering of draft variation No. 109 to the parliament today. I commend the committee's report to the parliament.

MR CORBELL (5.01): Draft variation No. 109 is a very significant proposal in relation to the Territory Plan. It was probably one of the most difficult inquiries I have faced in the Urban Services Committee. It was difficult because the committee was confronted with two very distinct challenges, and in this report we have endeavoured to reach a compromise within those two challenges that we faced. This is certainly not a report which is going to make everyone happy, I have no doubt about that, but any planning issue in Canberra will not make everyone happy all the time.

The challenges that this committee faced were twofold, as I said earlier. These were to meet the requirements, the demands and the concerns of those residents within the areas covered by the B11 and B12 boundaries who wish to remain in their existing residences and who wish to protect the amenity of the suburbs which they have grown up in, which they have lived in, in many cases, for many years, and in which they want to remain and those of the residents who want to sell and those proponents of development who want to redevelop an area.

The work done by PALM officers has been, for the most part, quite exemplary, as is quite clear from the painstaking efforts that they took in answering each and every one of the committee's questions, even on the times when we did not understand something and we needed to ask about it two, three or four times. Their patience and their persistence in explaining what they were attempting to achieve certainly did credit to the individuals concerned, and they are named in this report.

The committee was prepared to accept that there was a need for this type of variation, perhaps in some cases more reluctantly than in others. Because the area covered by the B11 and B12 zone has been one which has been the subject of redevelopment pressures and of proposals for redevelopment zones for a significant period of time, it was appropriate to ensure that redevelopment occurred in the area in a way which was sensitive to the existing amenity of the area, taking into account the interests of long-term residents as well as those of the development proponents.

The committee came to the view that the present uncertainty and confusion facing that area was helping no-one, neither the residents nor the developers, or the city as a whole, and that to resolve that question in the most sensible way it was appropriate to endorse variation No. 109, but with a number of important recommendations. I would just like to outline those briefly today. The first and perhaps most significant one, Mr Deputy Speaker, relates to the sections of the urban housing code which we were asked to consider along with the variation itself. In the urban housing code there are provisions for the overshadowing of existing dwellings.

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