Page 5497 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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I believe that my amendment is fully consistent with the objects of the Planning and Development Act, which does in fact require appropriate community consultation for proposed developments in the merit and impact tracks. The Greens are very concerned to ensure that community consultation is an integral, respected and properly working part of our planning system, and is not avoided through loopholes in planning legislation.
My next proposal is no less important in terms of achieving a more consistent—and more thoughtful, may I say—approach to implementing the principles of the territory plan. My bill proposes that the reconsideration of development application decisions should allow consideration of the full range of issues that the original decision maker used—for example, the territory plan objectives and zoning, as well as the territory plan rules.
Current clauses in our planning legislation specify that when ACTPLA or ACAT review a DA decision, they are restricted to considering the development proposal decision against the territory plan rules, without being able to consider the overall intent of the territory plan. This means that many of the important principles in the territory plan, which may have been taken into account as part of the original decision, cannot be considered in the review of the decision.
The bill removes this restriction and also allows ACAT to have the same jurisdiction as ACTPLA to investigate the full range of issues considered when it made its original decision. This proposal should ensure that greater consistency is applied to decisions and reconsiderations by decision makers at all levels in assessing development applications across the territory.
The third, and I suspect the most controversial, point in this bill is around improving standing rights for review of development application decisions. The bill inserts a number of provisions that increase standing rights allowing people to challenge development application decisions on their merits.
One amendment to increase standing is to expand the definition of an “eligible entity”. Currently, the act allows only a list of “eligible entities” the right to appeal a decision to ACAT. This bill expands these standing provisions so that people “whose interests are affected by a decision” also have the right to apply to ACAT for review. This would mean, for instance, that a community group that has made a submission on a development proposal, but does not have this issue within the objects of its constitution, would still be eligible to apply to ACAT for reconsideration of a decision.
Furthermore, the bill removes references to entities suffering “material detriment”, and instead extends the eligibility to make an appeal to any entity which made a representation or had a reasonable excuse for not making one. The argument of material detriment is not as important to the right for standing as “having an interest in the matter”, which of course can include material detriment anyway.
There are fears that opening up appeal rights to the broader community will lead to ACAT being flooded with a deluge of appeals. That was the commentary from the
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