Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2562 ..

much that it is now very difficult for the Planning and Land Authority to recruit qualified planners. That means that we have to redouble our efforts and perhaps allocate some more money to ensure that we can attract planners, so that we do not lose our position as a pre-eminent planned city and a place where planners want to practise their craft.

There is no support. A whole lot of stuff happens, a whole lot of reports are produced and, although people might have mixed views about the outcome of the spatial plan as a final document, the planning community, both within ACTPLA and its predecessor, and in the wider community, were bound down by that process. I think there were seven or eight iterations, different reports, that required community consultation. It is like that movie called The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer: you consult and consult and have elections on everything and referenda on everything until people eventually give up and have a referendum to do away with referenda. This is what has happened in this organisation.

The spatial plan process was too long and too drawn out and it sapped the energy of organisations and of the community. In addition to this, there has been a substantial failure on the part of the Stanhope government, and particularly this minister, to establish a clear and trusted process of community consultation. I do not know how many times people in the community talked to me about lack of trust. There were things such as DV200, to which 96 per cent of people who expressed views about it were opposed, but it was pushed through. There were occasions, such as when this Assembly voted to change the territory plan in relation to a block in Narrabundah occupied by Animals Afloat, when nothing happened and there was obfuscation. That grinds down the community’s trust.

There has been the startling failure of this minister to establish his community planning forums. At that time, a member said to me, “We have to solve the problem,” and he made a variety of suggestions about how we could get over the problem, but he kept saying that the fundamental reason that the CPFs failed is that they were too clever by half and they have further eroded the community’s trust. He said we could go back to other models, but that would be negative and there had been bad experiences.

We could devise an alternative to the CPFs. The trouble is, it would take a very long time and, again, trust will be lacking. The lack of trust is what we see. When the minister finally did come up with a new proposal—the community planning forums mark two or the LAPACs mark three—the community response was a complete lack of trust. All the organisations that I have spoken to are suspicious about what is being done. I think I have said, if not in this place then in other places, if Francis Fukuyama were to do a revision of his book Trust, he could come to the ACT and look at the planning system, as reigned over by Minister Corbell here, as an example of how trust does not work.

In addition to that, we have seen the failure of the neighbourhood planning system when residents of places such as Turner were desperately unhappy with the process. Although there was a bit of a splash of publicity the other day about Watson, Downer and Hackett, the people I speak to in Watson, Downer and Hackett express grave reservations about the process and feel that their trust in the process has been seriously undermined.

There is an increasing lack of confidence in the community in the planning process and I will touch on just two examples: block 80 on the Belconnen lake shore, where the

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .