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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2756 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I totally reject the notion that somehow, because an Assembly committee came out with a unanimous recommendation, I have to blindly support it. It is also quite incorrect to say, as I have noticed a couple of speakers have said, that the work of the committee was totally disregarded. Obviously, it was not. It was through going through the submissions and doing the thinking on this issue that we came up with the claims that we made of the government.

In the view of the Greens, the committee did take the easiest position when faced with an important set of changes about which there was considerable disagreement; that is, it said, in effect, "Most respondents have raised concerns about DV 200, so the government should go back to the drawing board and start again."I believe that this approach fails to address the disparate and often conflicting interests, and it seems that members of the committee were able to agree only on the fact that they did not like significant bits of the draft variation.

Simply opposing it outright would have been the easiest thing for me to do. It certainly would have saved me and a very committed adviser weeks of work reading submissions and consulting broadly. However, my responsibility is not to do what is easy, but what I think is in the interests of Canberra. I took the view after doing this work that there was an opportunity to deliver a far better result for Canberra than would have been delivered without my intervention.

Our primary area of disagreement with the committee report is on its main recommendation, No 2, that the government not proceed with the draft variation. We accept that the process of shaping the Territory Plan is an iterative one; that is, from time to time governments will want to implement a broad set of provisions to provide a framework for general application, and also specific-area variations that modify how the general provisions apply in a particular area.

If catering for the differences in specific areas is not dealt with well through this process, the criticisms along the lines of the overall framework being a one-size-fits-all policy become more valid. I will go into much more detail through this speech about what will ensure that we will see the detail taken into account. As the minister has already pointed out, that has already happened. But that does not negate the need for a general framework and set of principles to guide the ongoing process of considering development approvals across the territory.

It is this dynamic of providing for both the general and the specific that we understand is intended to underpin the framework provided by DV 200, and the specific area draft variations that come through the neighbourhood planning process. We accept that there needs to be a general overlay such as DV 200 for planning guidelines. We do not accept the argument that DV 200 should be scrapped until the spatial plan is completed. The two are quite different in concept, the spatial plan providing broad and strategic directions for Canberra's growth and DV 200 providing a framework for what suburbs will look like at that level.

It is not as if this variation has introduced a radical new concept in planning. To the contrary, it is just establishing principles which have been thoroughly debated in this place and in the community for more than 10 years, which the Labor Party went to the

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