Page 2483 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 July 2008
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During my time in Canberra, I have long had an interest in planning. I have seen LAPACs and neighbourhood planning processes, and I have seen the death of LAPACs and neighbourhood planning processes. I have read Meredith Edwards’s review of stakeholder engagement in ACT planning—a very useful report which disappeared, not long after it appeared, from ACTPLA’s website. And I viewed the sorry response to it, where resource-strapped community councils are now at the front-line of community engagement on planning in their towns. I have seen presidents and other office-bearers of community councils burn out and observed how difficult they are to replace, due to the very high volume of voluntary work expected of them.
The latest fiasco which exemplified the conservative approach of this government to consultation in planning was the gas-fired power plant. Enough has been said about that for me not to go into it, I believe.
Too often, consultation comes too late and is too little. This was frequently stated by the stakeholders who were consulted by the National Institute of Governance. At the big end, of course, we had the consultation which led to the Canberra spatial plan. Why did that not set a framework for the location of big utility projects like the gas-fired power plant so that residents could get in and have their say, long before their legitimate concerns are dismissed as self-interested, which is how the government seems to have responded to the Macarthur residents?
Of course, there is concern that the spatial plan, about which such a big deal was made at the time, and about which a very large number of expensive urban and non-urban studies were conducted, has been forgotten as soon as it was printed and as soon as the election was over. I am interested in what the Minister for Planning will now come up with, but we are meant to have had a review two years ago, and we are meant to be having a total and close look at the plan next year.
So how can people have faith? We need to question whether ACTPLA, without more resources and a conscious objective to improve its social planning and community engagement, does have the capacity to engage adequately with the community. Edwards pointed out:
Effective community consultation is demanding and difficult, requiring considerable skill, persistence and good will. It is not typically a skill set planners, developers or bureaucrats acquire as a matter of course in their professional development.
Let me read to you “A planner’s responsibility to the public”, which is cited by Edwards and which was spelled out by the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner for Ireland in 1978, and cited in 2003:
A planner’s primary obligation is to serve the public interest. While the definition of the public interest is formulated through continuous debate, a planner owes allegiance to a conscientiously attained concept of the public interest, which requires these special obligations:
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