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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 4430 ..

MRS DUNNE (3.48): Mr Speaker, when we met in this Assembly in the early days of December 2001, the planning minister, Mr Corbell, made some very Whitlamesque pronouncements about his strategic whole-of-government approach to planning. He said, "No aspect of long-term planning will be left untouched."I recall suggesting at the time that we needed to be afraid, very afraid.

Two years on, my predictions have shown that I can be quiet prescient on planning matters. What we have now is a complete litany of failures from this minister, a seething sea of discontent in the community and former allies now turned to enemies. Specifically, we have a new planning system that fulfils all of my worst predictions and then some.

Let's look at some examples. One that was raised in question time this week was Mr Wason's inability to get planning approval for student accommodation in Tasman House. The minister thought he was doing the right thing and, in response to this, he said:

The issue with that development is that the development went through the standard process for assessing the development requirements and what specific design issues needed to be addressed-nothing more, nothing less.

We had to address a range of issues, including overshadowing, Mr Speaker. We had to address the issue of overshadowing for a building that had been standing in the one place for 30 years. No wonder this former factional ally is now calling for the head of this minister and threatening his preselection.

Of course, that is not the only example. We have a complete litany of disasters under this minister. St Anne's convent is being rezoned for aged care but that has been going on for nearly four years now. Retail sites in Gungahlin for Coles, Woolies and Aldi took over two years to be approved. Then we had the debacle of draft variation 200, where only 4 per cent of the community who had anything to say about draft variation 200 were in favour of its implementation. However, Mr Corbell managed to have his own way, with the connivance of the Greens in this place, even though only 4 per cent of the people wanted it. At least you can say he is not concerned with base populism.

We have had the Turner neighbourhood planning debacle, the unconscionable delays over section 56, now section 84, and the Jamison master plan, which took more than four years and is still going on. Even though we have now finalised the Jamison master plan, the owner of the Jamison shopping centre, who wants to make changes to his shopping centre that comply with the master plan, is now required to do a preliminary assessment. Getting that through may take another two years.

This last couple of weeks, we have had both Watson and Hackett residents absolutely up in arms over their neighbourhood planning process. We have lopsided development because we cannot build in Civic and in the town centres what we have at the airport. We have also had yesterday's admission that this minister's model for community planning forums, the sons of LAPACs, was a complete failure and that it is back to the drawing board. It must be gall and wormwood to this minister that Mr Humphries's model for

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