Page 3016 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 September 2006
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inquiry the committee received several submissions, oral and written, highlighting the need to change the culture within the authority.
The fourth component is resourcing of the assessment authority. The committee is of the view that the assessing authority’s level of resourcing influences the efficiency, effectiveness and economy of the development assessment system. Several submissions and witnesses at public hearings drew the committee’s attention to resourcing issues in ACTPLA.
The fifth component is continuous improvement of the assessment process. The committee is of the view that the assessing authority’s continuous improvement processes influence the efficiency, effectiveness and economy of the development assessment system. Formal feedback processes are vital techniques for monitoring change and for collecting and applying feedback to ensure continuous improvement. The committee is of the view that the authority and advice agencies have an obligation to contribute to system improvement and to continuously evaluate their own processes.
Submissions and witnesses appearing before the committee highlighted areas of concern and issues in connection with each of the five fundamental components of development assessment previously mentioned. The committee’s report examines these issues and areas of concern.
The committee’s report makes 20 recommendations covering various aspects of the development assessment process. Obviously, I do not intend to go through the detail of each of those recommendation, but I would draw members’ attention to a number of those recommendations—in particular, the first recommendation, which recommends that ACTPLA collate all AAT decisions and provide these in a clear and concise manifest so that a database of case law is easily accessible on the ACTPLA web site for use by staff and proponents.
The committee also recommended that ACTPLA prioritise the development of a more formalised training program to ensure that its staff have a better understanding of legislative requirements. I understand issues of staffing and recruitment that were outlined by the minister and officers before the hearing and I will come to those a little further in my comments.
The committee also expressed the view that ACTPLA needed to ensure that its community engagement practices were consistent with the territory government’s community engagement initiative. We have also recommended that ACTPLA implement measures to ensure compliance with the decisions of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal within reasonable time frames. I think these recommendations speak for themselves.
We have also recommended under recommendation 7 that ACTPLA encourage the use of conciliation and mediation processes to resolve disputes and conflicts over development assessment processes before a matter ends up before the AAT. Whilst this issue has come up on more than one occasion, there was one celebrated case study which was examined by the committee and on which we heard evidence.
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