Page 3618 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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presentation, as it were? Real consultation is a situation where you have an idea, a proposal or whatever and then you go to someone else and consult them. You get the feedback from them in a way where you are prepared to actually change the results on the basis of the feedback you get. In the planning process, that can be where we are most seriously lacking.
Most of the consultation the government does on planning has very specific proposals, some of which are close to being already underway, where the community consultation is the last step and the community usually has very limited options, or more likely no options, for changing them.
In the case of the old Latham petrol station, ACTPLA did the community notification process, but unfortunately, I am told, it forgot to tell the community that it was not just a lease variation but a development proposal as well. The community was only in a position to comment on the lease variation. When ACTPLA then realised that they had skipped the notification on the proposal itself, it was added later. They told the community, and I am sure they are correct, that what they did was absolutely legal. It may well have been legal but it was not consultation in good faith.
That brings me to some of the issues on consultation that were brought up in the planning committee’s recent work in the inquiry on the Lyons draft variation. The proposal changed markedly from the one in the 2001 master plan, but the changes do not appear to have been in response to the community’s concerns. As the Woden Valley Community Council said in its submission:
To find out at this late stage, and only through the release of the Draft Variation, that the proposal has changed from medium density maximum 3 storey (with a 9 storey tower) to high density 6 storeys to be allowed to be developed over the entire site (with set back of 50 m) and a 10 storey tower, flies in the face of all the years of earlier consultation with WVCC. It is a similar example to the disregard given by ACTPLA to the Woden Town Centre Master Plan after at least 3 years intense consultation with the community.
The consultation has been such an issue that, in the majority report on DV288, the majority—all three of us in the committee—commented on the consultation issues. Our first recommendation was:
… that the ACT Planning and Land Authority commission all Planning Studies itself and, where a Territory Plan Variation is initiated by request from a proponent, require the proponent to fund the cost of the study.
The reason we said that is that people were seeing the planning studies as being simply a tool of the proponent.
The majority report went on to make three other recommendations with respect to consultation. One was “that ACTPLA not combine multiple planning and zoning issues into a single Draft Variation in future”, because it was really confusing to the people. Another was that there should be better documentation available so that people could understand the current territory plan provisions and that ACTPLA should ensure that in the future all relevant documentation is available to the public
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