Page 1386 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
not worth pursuing after grade 3, that it was bad policy, that it was unaffordable—copied it. He was forced to copy it. I do not think he made the decision. I think that the government, the Labor Party, made the decision to copy.
It is no surprise then that he had to copy part of our planning policy. We saw it on the day when he announced it; parts of it could have just been lifted from ours. Unfortunately, he did not lift as much as he should have; it would have been a far better policy if he had just lifted the whole thing. We were flattered, nonetheless, that he did copy some of it.
It is about unclogging the planning system. It is what we have been saying—that you can get the legislation in place. The legislative framework we have is now not a bad one. It may well need some amendment going forward, but it is not a bad framework. How you then implement that through the planning authority is still critical. We did not see the kind of cultural change that we have called for. We did not see the kind of shifting of resources and reallocation of resources to recognise that development applications need the resources behind them in order to get through the system. Before Christmas we saw some movement on that, and we are very pleased.
We are very pleased always to welcome good policy. We will support good policy when it is put forward by the government, whether it is copied from us or brought from elsewhere. If we see it as good policy in the interests of the territory, we will support it. When the minister announced it just before Christmas, we were happy to support it because it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do to try to unclog some of the backlog of DAs.
There are mixed reports coming from industry. We do hear about some of the turnover of development applications now, but there is a suspicion, certainly in large parts of industry, that what they are doing is simply dealing with some of the easy and simple ones, which is fine—but as to the actual value of development applications going through, and how much is getting through in terms of economic activity, that remains to be seen. That is something the minister is going to have to let the community know. What is the value of development applications going through and how much is that increasing with any of the changes that have been put in place?
Whilst it is important that we get through some of the minor stuff—that is important—we also need to see the things that really create jobs, with major developments not being unreasonably delayed. That is up to the planning authority—to do the work and have the resources to get that through. We have not seen evidence of that yet. If the minister wants to present us with evidence, we would be very pleased to see it, but that is the suspicion in industry and that is the feedback from industry that we are getting. Yes, things have improved somewhat, but there is still a long way to go. Indeed, there is a concern that, in order to artificially prop up the numbers, some of the minor stuff is being pushed through. That is good, but are the major developments and the value of development in the territory that is clogged in the system being cleared. Is that being approved so that we can see some of these developments?
Let us get back to the rationale that has been put for this, and it is a rationale that we support. The rationale is that we need to push this stuff through quickly—because of
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .