Page 3619 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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during the statutory draft variation consultation time. I note that the issue of documentation being available is not unique to this particular territory plan variation; I have heard it mentioned in a number of cases.
Let me go to some things that I said in my minority report. It was very noticeable that what people commented on was the indicative pictures, as it were—the detail which would come in the development application. They did not comment so much on the territory plan variation, because most people—most humans—cannot understand the legalese that it is written in. So if there was an artist’s impression which looked good, people were happy with it. The problem is that that artist’s impression was a possible development, but not a development that was actually being proposed and it was not the territory plan variation that people were being consulted on.
One of the proposals that I made was that ACTPLA should provide a drawing of what the territory plan variation could mean, as it were, in its maximum impact so that with the block drawing covered in the 10-storey element in DV288—it was potentially 50 metres in diameter—the drawing should be there with 50 metres diameter and have the six-storey elements over the entire area that they could be. Using the much more attractive indicative dwellings made the whole thing look potentially more realistic, but it was potentially misleading.
Moving away from that, other instances of planning issues seen in this Assembly have been in Hawker and Nicholls. Both of those are issues where the community consultation has been so poor that the issue has been brought to the Assembly and the Assembly has been asked to try and make some sort of planning determination on the floor of the Assembly. As Mr Barr says, keep the politics out of planning. Having such poor consultation that the Assembly feels it has to make determinations is not the way to go.
Let me look more broadly at the territory plan, the role of consultation and the role of ACTPLA. We have the situation where the territory plan covers almost everything. ACTPLA is in a situation where, if the proposal, the development application, that it receives is consistent with the territory plan—by this I mean not just that it has got the same land use purpose, but that it has got the correct setbacks, it is the correct height et cetera—basically ACTPLA has to agree with it.
What this means for consultation is that there is really no role for consultation. The development application notice goes up outside the new block of flats or whatever it is going to be. The affected neighbours busily write their comments, whatever they may be; then they go in to ACTPLA. I do not know what ACTPLA says; I am not in ACTPLA. But whatever ACTPLA says—whether ACTPLA thinks there is merit or not—ACTPLA is in the situation where, if the development application is consistent with all the parts of the territory plan, ACTPLA has to approve it. So the whole consultation becomes—
Mr Barr: Didn’t they go to some length to explain the process to you?
MS LE COUTEUR: We did go through that. Mr Barr, we did go through that.
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