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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2575 ..

and, I believe, very long overdue. The only thing that worries me about it, Minister, is whether you are going to be able to make some of these things retrospective so that you may at least assist some of these people who have been so grievously inconvenienced in their home and indeed their lifestyles.

MS TUCKER (9.05): I welcome this debate on planning in Canberra. The key planning issues that the Greens have campaigned for publicly and worked for here in the Assembly are community participation in planning processes, reasonable appeal processes, an end to developer-led planning decisions and improved outcomes on ecological sustainability. I would say that everyone here has demonstrated an enthusiasm for those ideas at different times and I do not think the outcome is consistent with those goals.

I do not think there is an argument that the community consultation processes to date are either clear or trusted. It has been argued that it is par for the course and that everybody sees every issue differently once it is happening over their fence or in their suburb.

The shift from pressure groups to LAPACs, to the idea of community planning forums, to the proposed partnerships with community councils needs some picking over. Pressure groups, whether they are residents associations or business lobbies, can and do get outcomes on a case-by-case basis. The overall effect, however, is not always good.

One of the strengths of Canberra is that it grew up as a planned city. Unfortunately, we then saw a piecemeal approach to redevelopment, illustrated by the Canberra Centre take-over of Ainslie Avenue and, later, both its expansion and the sale of the Griffin Centre and the Bunda Street car park. They all clearly illustrate the problems of such an approach.

The LAPACs were a partial attempt to address the lack of any formal community input into town planning. They were structured for some diversity which, given the community’s response, tends to otherwise be skewed to particular interests or perspectives.

While the most annoying thing about LAPACs for others might be the occasional level of detail they would get down to and then their distress at the lack of support available to allow them to do that detailed work, I think we would have to acknowledge that the concerns coming out of this fine-grain scrutiny were too often perfectly justified and rather affirmed the value of administrative appeals processes. Certainly this work of LAPACs often highlighted the significance of effective appeal processes for appropriate third parties as well as those immediately affected. LAPACs did not cover the whole of the city, however, and they did take on particular flavours that maybe frustrated the planning regime that would have been trying to take a coherent approach to planning and development.

One of the community planning processes that the Greens have long advocated is neighbourhood planning. Recent experience in the inner north of Canberra warrants picking over. Some time in 1998, I recall, ACT Housing proposed two-storey terrace-style redevelopment of ACT Housing properties in Ainslie. There was a fairly vociferous rejection of the idea by Ainslie residents, particularly homeowners who

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