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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (6 September) . . Page.. 2900 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

planning processes, in which decisions seem to be made that a particular development will go ahead because a particular developer wants it, regardless of whether sufficient assessment has been undertaken or of the desirability of this development.

There have also been cutbacks to Planning and Land Management that have reduced the level of assessment of particular development applications in the guise of streamlining the approval process. The whole planning process has been tilted in favour of the developer and against the interests of residents.

I can think of a number of examples where the Greens objected to the detail of development, rather than the developer itself: Manuka Plaza-I don't think anyone just wanted to save the car park. It was always about the scale of development relative to the rest of Manuka and the tender process' bias towards including a large supermarket.

In relation to the B11 and B12 zones in north Canberra, the original B1 zone, which I recall was actually a Labor Party initiative, encouraged piecemeal and monolithic development. There should have been local area planning to determine more precisely the most appropriate scale of development in particular parts of north Canberra. The B11 and B12 zones and the section master plans were an improvement on the B1 zoning, but could have been done better.

The problems regarding Woden Plaza and the Canberra Centre included the scale of development, and the insufficient account taken of economic impacts on surrounding traders.

We are happy to support development on Kingston foreshores, if it actually fulfils its stated objective of being an ecologically sustainable development. Indications so far have been that market considerations will prevail. I have given credit to the government on the Kingston foreshore development consultation process. There was a community brief provided, which actually came out very strongly in support of the principles of ecologically sustainable development becoming the underlying principles for this development. That was great. Unfortunately, we are just watching the process move sideways.

The McKellar soccer stadium site definitely needed to be cleaned up, but whether we needed a major soccer stadium there was questionable. In fact, we are still waiting for this oval to be constructed.

It is good to consolidate development in Civic, but we are still concerned about the openness of the tender process on section 56. It was certainly less open than it was regarding Manuka. The government produced press releases, when they were developing the Manuka site, about the process and why the preferred option was chosen, but chose not to do that with section 56 for no good reason. They did not give any good reason for that.

The mix of uses on the site, and the need to maintain community facilities, have not been adequately addressed, and there has not been adequate consultation on those matters. I have questioned the government about its processes here.

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