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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 4439 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

LAPACs. In the meantime, planning and development continues apace without sufficient community consultation. Not only does this remove the ability of residents to shape their own communities, but it creates increased conflict with new developments when residents have to resort to statutory and legal means to address their concerns. We no longer have any community consultation. We only have the statutory requirements; so if there's a problem, it has to go through the courts or the tribunals. How is that a good planning process?

After two years looking after planning, the Labor Party has managed to make the community as angry and disillusioned with the government policy as it was under the Liberals and that is saying something.

The community planning forums disaster is mirrored by the neighbourhood planning collapse. The minister says he had them done on time and there is no argument there, but increasingly neighbourhood planning groups are rebelling against the plans they were supposed to help develop, seeing the whole process as a smokescreen which the government uses to impose new planning policies from above. I understand that the community has welcomed none of the recent neighbourhood plans, with the vast bulk of them being opposed by those who engaged in the planning process.

It appears that the whole basis of neighbourhood planning has been undermined by the refusal of the government to engage with the ideas put forward by the community. Instead, it has ridden roughshod over their wishes and come up with a plan that is completely inconsistent with the aims of local communities.

I welcomed the neighbourhood planning idea. I thought it was a good one and a good way of getting people involved in the development of their suburb. I was concerned that it happened in the older suburbs first and not in areas that were crying out for it, such as Gungahlin, but now we are hearing from the community that the neighbourhood planning process was almost a sham, that their community involvement was just ignored.

We still have a number of issues in relation to consultation on which this government has failed. There have been continuous refusals to begin developing a master plan for the Kippax group centre and we are now seeing the conflict that is generated as community members respond to the haphazard development proposals that the lack of coordination has caused. Of course, there is no planning forum in which to consult on these developments since the LAPACs were shut down, so naturally the local community feels completely disenfranchised.

We have also seen the minister's inflexibility in his dealing with the development of the Gungahlin town centre, along with many other issues. This leaves the ACT in a very precarious position. Planning is not just about having lots of experts sitting in a room and developing a bunch of rules that everyone else has to follow. Good planning is about working with local communities to both communicate the trade-offs that governments face, as well as the grassroots ideas, and developing those into a cohesive framework of which residents have some sense of ownership. Good planning comes from the bottom up, not the top down.

However, this government, representing a more informed view of planning than the previous Liberal regime did, is still all about top-down planning. Planning in the ACT is

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