Page 1784 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
by email that day. They should get an acknowledgement email that day. That is a very simple matter. You put it in, you get an email and that is when the process starts. But it does not start a couple of weeks later, when they get around to it. That is not how this planning system was set up, that is not what we were led to believe and that is not a simpler, faster and more effective planning system.
We go through more of the minister’s statement. As you read through the pages you get to page 5, where he says, “Simpler, faster and more effective.” But then he says, “In December last year, in response to the looming financial crisis”—it had nothing to do with the fact that things were not working—“and industry concerns”. You can read that it was industry concerns that led to this. It had little, if anything, to do with the financial crisis, but that is the catch-all excuse for all of the failings of government. These are long-held industry concerns and, of course, the government has ignored them. In response to this, the government announced ACTPLAn. In fact, it happened just before Christmas.
I think we know why it happened just before Christmas. It was because of the embarrassment, again, of the planning minister. Remember, this is a planning minister who is also the education minister who had to go out and argue against the smaller class sizes policy. He was sent by the government to say why it was a bad idea, why it was unaffordable, why it really would not make any difference and then he had to turn around and actually match it. He had to turn around and adopt it as his own policy. So I can only imagine his embarrassment when cabinet, industry pressure or whatever it was led to him being told, “Look, you need to adopt more of the Liberal Party’s policies.” I can only imagine the embarrassment that there would have been for this minister.
Forgive me if I quote from my press release, but it is worth doing so because it goes to some of the embarrassment. We see:
“Redeploying staff to clear backlogs is lifted directly from page 2—
of our policy—
where we promised a task force of staff to assist with clearing the bottlenecks.
Unclogging the system, I believe, was part of what we had. We see:
“Assigning more shopfront staff is a direct copy of our plan for a Small Business Response Team which was to operate an advice line and over the counter help.
“Changes to make applications quicker can be found under our section ‘Fixing the logjam of development applications” on page four.
And this is part of the problem. We are very pleased that the minister has made some of those changes. When the minister puts forward a policy which we believe is right we will support it; we will support it to the hilt. And, if it happens to be our policy, all the better. We are not going to oppose it. We will support it when it is good policy. It is indicative, I think, of the planning minister’s priorities that a couple of months after an election the only agenda items he has are to lift part of our policy.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .