Page 1975 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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He said not in his lifetime. I expect Mr Hargreaves will live a long and healthy life. Maybe in his nineties he will die. So we have about 40 years before this busway might be built. It is not going to happen, but millions of dollars have been wasted. We had the busway, and the planning minister could not get it done.
We had the planning system reform process, which was meant to deliver us a piece of draft legislation, first in February and then in March, and now I do not know when it is going to happen. We have spent the money and it has not been delivered, so we have doubled the funding for next year. I think it is about $595,000 for the planning system reform process. We spent all this money and all we got were some glossy brochures. We did not produce the legislation, so we are going to double it and, hopefully, something will be produced in the next financial year.
Can I tell you that industry is crying out for reform of the planning system? Yes, planning system reform is a good idea, but we have not seen much of it yet. All we have seen are a few glossy brochures. We have seen a few hundred thousand dollars spent. We have not seen the targets that were set delivered and now we have seen the funding doubled. We very much hope, and I am sure industry very much hopes, that we will see something for that $600,000 spending.
We have seen the changes in relation to the way planning is done in this budget. ACTPLA no longer has control of land management function and land policy. What does that mean? That essentially means that the ACTPLA that Simon Corbell created and the planning reforms that he put in place a few years ago are slowly starting to unravel. The experiment that Mr Corbell put in place is unravelling.
The government abolished the LAPACs when they came in. They promised to replace them but did not. The planning and land council has been abolished in this budget. So we are seeing the unwinding of this planning minister’s reforms. Can I say it is about time we started to see them unwind? I will get to the LDA in a minute, but I think we want to see some more movement on the LDA. We have all seen some token changes in this budget.
Who would want to build a home in the ACT at the moment? Under this budget we have development application costs going from $569 to $1,085—doubling. Who is going to pay for that? First home buyers. It is first home buyers who will pay the price for this. It is another example of how the people of Canberra, not this government, will continue to pay for this government’s economic mismanagement over the past few years.
Just before I turn away from planning, we had a statement on the LDA in the Chief Minister’s budget address. That was in relation to how cabinet is going to consider a set amount of land to go to market. I think that was the first sign that the LDA’s monopoly on land release is going to end. I can only hope that that is the case. If I have misread that, then I am disappointed.
I hope that that is the first sign from this government that they are going to reform the LDA and that it will not continue to have this conflict of interest, being the monopoly land supplier as well as a significant developer in this town. It is an area where industry has significant concerns and it is an area where the opposition has serious concerns. I hope that is the first signal from this Chief Minister or Treasurer that this will change and
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