Page 1779 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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agreed upon and included in these legislative instruments. My office did ask in May to start that process through briefings, but the new minister’s staff was unable to find us any time until 9 August. I know my staff have been frustrated, to say the least, about that process and I regret the lost opportunity to make some small and some not so small improvements on which we seem to find common ground with ACTPLA officers.
In any event, I will move a number of amendments at the detail stage, but those amendments are merely to oppose some key clauses. That will give me the opportunity to put the Greens’ concerns about some of the details of this bill on the record. In some minor cases they also offer the minister an opportunity to put those concerns to rest.
But I have a number of general concerns which I will outline here rather than oppose each and every clause that contains such principles in the detailed stage. This legislation overall invests too much power in the planning minister. It constantly relies on the minister to make good decisions rather than having good equitable in-built processes.
There are a number of areas which rely on the good intentions of government and/or the minister. This is exacerbated by many areas being too weak and using words like “may”, and an example of this is the consequential amendment to the Heritage Act. Another example is clause 59 of the bill. ACTPLA may be required to give the heritage council a copy of each development application for proposals in the merit or impact tracks. In previous legislation the council had to give copies of all proposals relating to heritage sites. I can understand that everything is being moved to the track-based system, but I think in this case all heritage site-related applications should legally, as a matter of course, be passed onto the council to provide appropriate scrutiny.
Clause 221 allows the minister to establish a panel to conduct an inquiry about an environmental impact statement. Again, it is completely up to the minister. There is no need to take advice from anyone on this issue, whether it be the conservator or a department, including his or her own. Worse yet, the minister can decide not to establish a panel and can choose whether or not to present the EIS to the Assembly. In this case, all the minister has to do is to give ACTPLA written notice of the decision.
The Greens think that this is woefully deficient. If there was a strong enough reason to undertake an EIS in the first place, then it cannot be too big a task to present the findings to the Assembly. Again, it is a case of relying on good intentions instead of relying on strong legislation. I should not have to point out the obvious in this place, that intentions are only as good as the government of the day, but legislation gives intentions legs to stand on. And strong legs are good legs.
In the 2005 government response to the review of leases there was a commitment to a whole-of-government approach to this legislation broadly and to a number of particular areas. Unfortunately, as well as being minister heavy, this legislation is department heavy. ACTPLA has a lot of power to make a number of planning decisions which would ideally have reference to other departments.
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