Page 2306 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
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priorities, or could even be an admission of defeat. Perhaps it means a downgrading of the value of community participation, and certainly it could have a very deleterious impact on participatory democracy.
I was fortunate to be briefed on this amendment and I thank the minister’s office for arranging that. In the briefing I was told that the regulation is a response to two problems. One problem is that developers have been using or abusing the review process to try to hold up or stymie their competitors. I am sure that this problem has created great angst for ACTPLA and certainly for the government a number of times. The result has been that the minister has used his call-in powers on a number of occasions. The other problem is that people are using the appeals mechanism to fight battles on policy issues rather than on the merits of any particular development project. The officer who gave me the briefing believes these disputes are more properly fought in other venues where it does not impact adversely on developers whose projects are unfairly held up.
Of course, in developing our city we are in a symbiotic relationship with developers who we rely upon to put in the capital, to organise the labour and to create the buildings. We are also in competition with other jurisdictions to attract investment capital and projects. But we need to make sure that we do not shift the balance too far towards the developers. In this case it is favouring the successful developer over adjoining developers or other developers. Of course, legal costs are tax deductible for companies and directors and they can have financial motivations for using whatever avenues they can get away with to pursue their personal or corporate interests. They are also used to operating within a system where the ethos is that if there is an arguable case that you will not be found to have been aware that it might have been illegal, then it is okay.
One problem with operating under the rule of law is that society at large does not hold our business community accountable to any particular meaningful standard of moral behaviour. We saw this to some extent in the debate around the Narrabundah long stay park. We were told repeatedly that the developer concerned was just acting as a developer does, to maximise profits. There was no requirement upon that developer or any other developer to consider the social or other impacts of his work. I am interested to see that the federal government is developing a corporate code of conduct and a lot of corporations and other business groups are adopting their own codes of conduct. This is something that we should be encouraging. Of course, it is a sideline from the argument that I am putting here but I think we are aware it is an issue.
Triple bottom line accounting is still struggling to find corporate acceptance or adoption by governments. While there is much fine rhetoric, it has not yet been embedded in our systems. At least there is a tacit recognition that economic performance indicators are not the absolute guiding light. My objection to this disallowable instrument is that it takes away third-party appeal rights without maintaining that capacity for community groups and concerned individuals, including legitimately aggrieved business people, to challenge government planning decisions. It fixes the problem of improper use of the appeal system by unscrupulous business people, but it kills off an important avenue for public participation in the process as though that public participation has no value at all.
As the Assembly knows, I have introduced a bill to protect public participation precisely because my constituency has been on the receiving end of the dirty tactics of corporations in the ACT—though we do not have many instances, I think developers
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