Page 1783 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Party. Of course, if you believe that, you will believe anything. He says it on several occasions. As the speech went on we could see that he was maybe starting to believe it a little bit. Once he said it a few times, he started to warm to it and believes that maybe the planning system actually is simpler, faster and more effective.
Mr Smyth: But he did miss it the first time.
MR SESELJA: He did miss it the first time. In fact, he refused to read it. I do not know whether there was perhaps a grain of truth. Maybe that was the initial embarrassment where he could not quite bring himself to say that the planning system under him is simpler, faster and more effective. It is worth going through some of the detail of what the planning minister had to say, apart from the slogans. He said: “We’re getting there. When applicants have provided the required documentation up-front, they can have their applications assessed in a much shorter time frame.”
It is worth going to some of the specifics, because what we are hearing from industry—and this is a constant refrain—is that the stop clock is being used by ACTPLA to distort the figures. When they put the stop clock on, it means that they do not go beyond the time that they are given to assess applications. The stop clock might be put on for fairly minor queries, which means that ACTPLA, the planning authority, has the opportunity to take longer and it does not show up in the figures as taking too long. This is one of the ways in which these figures are being distorted and it is a constant refrain.
The other way—and this is one that is quite extraordinary and one which we often hear about from industry—concerns the acknowledgement of the receipt of the application. This is bureaucracy gone mad, but I had a conversation with a builder in recent weeks who told me that when he submits a development application in some cases it takes weeks before they acknowledge that they have received it. You might put it in on 10 March but they do not acknowledge that they have received it until maybe the end of March or April, and of course the clock does not start until then. We hear of this kind of behaviour more and more.
Where the planning system has gone so wrong under the planning minister and his predecessor, Mr Corbell, is that they have refused to deal with the cultural and structural issues within ACTPLA. We have spoken a lot about and the minister focuses a lot of his attention on the legislation, but the legislation is not the creation of this minister or even the previous minister. The legislation is based on the DAF model which was developed at a national level. The legislative framework is not bad. Whilst we moved a number of amendments and voted against some aspects of it, the actual framework was not the problem. That is perhaps why the minister focuses on that. In many ways that is the easy bit; the legislation is the easy bit. The hard bit is making it work in practice. The hard bit is having the resources where you need them in ACTPLA so that we do not see these delays and we do not see these kinds of tactics to try and show that things are happening more quickly than they are and that the planning authority is more effective at dealing with development applications than it is.
The use of the stop clock needs to be addressed by this minister and he should ensure that when someone lodges a development application they get an acknowledgement
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .