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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 640 ..

anywhere else in the bureaucracy; that anything that is being done to address the needs of an ageing population is being done in an expeditious fashion. That does not mean that you cut corners or anything like that, but that you do not take your eye off the ball.

What has happened is that this government have taken their eye off the ball, to an extent that I find breathtaking. On the Stateline program the other day, after all the kerfuffle about Calvary, which has been going on for four years to my certain knowledge, this is what the planning minister said about the Calvary development:

I’m not familiar with the details of exactly what Calvary will need to do to meet that deadline—what I know is that the proper planning process is being worked through—

At a snail’s pace—

and that the preliminary assessment which is required under the Land Act has identified some issues to do with bushfire risk…

(Extension of time granted.) This is the whole problem, and it is a problem that goes back to the Land Act. It is the sort of selective way that planning is done. Sometimes you can do a development application and a preliminary assessment at the same time but sometimes, basically at the whim of the planning authority, they have to be done sequentially, which means it takes twice as much time to do it. We are trying to find a process where, whilst meeting all the requirements under the act, there is no needless delay. The proposal for Calvary by the Little Company of Mary is a textbook case of needless delay and I do not want to see it repeated again. I do not want to see a repeat of Calvary. I do not want to see a repeat of the Southern Cross Homes delays. I do not want to see a repeat of the Aranda fiasco. I and members of the opposition want to see an orderly process for people making applications and putting forward proposals to provide for a much needed service—most of it at no cost to this government except for a bit of time and effort in dealing with people in an expeditious fashion; that is all the government have to do. We are not asking them to fork out large sums of money.

We want to see an end to these needless delays and one way to ensure an end to the needless delays is to have a list of all the proposals that are before the government. The list in the motion is quite deliberately extensive because we want to know how many applications there are for land allocation for aged persons accommodation. We want to know how many development applications there are and what status they have. But we also need to know how many people are in a pre-application stage of some form with the planning authority. We want to know how many people are having discussions. I do not mean the first phone calls from people wanting to talk about aged care, but those who have actually got drawings on a piece of paper. We want to know how many proposals there are at the HQSD process. We want to know how many proposals like the Aranda one have been withdrawn and how many there are like the golf course one, which seemed to have been knocked back but the umpire seems to be out on that still; we are not entirely sure whether it has been knocked back or not.

What this motion seeks is certainty. What it seeks is to provide us with enough information so that all of us in this place are singing from the one hymn sheet, so that we all know that we are talking about the same thing and so that this government and this minister cannot duck and weave behind formal applications and applications for land but

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