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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (14 October) . . Page.. 3113 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

incorporate it into the adjacent nature reserve as part of the open space system. In relation to the ability of the ACT Government to do this, the ACT Government Solicitor, in his advice, confirmed:

That is the only constraint on the Government. Do they think they want to exercise that power? Clearly, the current Government is not interested in protecting the open space network and exploring the potential of the use of that power under the club's lease. Further, the views of a significant number of submissions which urged that this option be exercised or at least explored have been confirmed by this advice.

Mr Speaker, the second key reason why the Assembly should support this disallowance today is the fundamental inconsistency this variation has with principles of the Territory Plan and with the maintenance of Canberra's open space system, informal and formal. The majority report of the standing committee's inquiry into the draft variation has chosen to ignore the fundamental inconsistencies that this proposal has with these principles.

Of even greater concern is the extraordinarily broad interpretation of these principles by the Planning and Land Management Group of the Department of Urban Services. The majority of the standing committee has not addressed the inconsistency of the answers provided by PALM officials in relation to these matters when they were raised during the public hearings of the committee.

The standing committee received representations from a range of individuals and from the Burley Griffin LAPAC that the proposal to vary the Territory Plan to allow for housing was inconsistent with a range of relevant principles. These included principle 3.2, which states:

This principle is designed to prevent development of precisely the nature proposed at Federal - the development of a small, isolated residential enclave that is inefficient to service and relies entirely on the private motor vehicle. The draft variation indicates that the proposal will rely entirely on the private motor vehicle as its only form of access. This was further confirmed by the proposal's preliminary assessment, which indicated that the development would be "a residential island".

A range of submissions further indicated that the definition of a precinct being applied by PALM in relation to this development was being very loosely applied. I quote from one of the witnesses at the inquiry:

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