Page 5498 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Liberal and Labor parties in the Canberra Times yesterday. Similar New South Wales planning legislation has broader appeal rights than ours, and it seems not to be the case. The New South Wales Environmental Planning and Assessment Act allows for open standing. Justice Peter McClellan, Chief Judge at Common Law, New South Wales Supreme Court, studied the first 25 years of these increased standing rights, and found that they did not cause the floodgates to open, and in fact have led to better decisions overall.
Standing provisions under section 123 of the New South Wales planning and assessment act, which covers all New South Wales planning and environment issues, state:
(1) Any person may bring proceedings in the Court for an order to remedy or restrain a breach of this Act, whether or not any right of that person has been or may be infringed by or as a consequence of that breach.
(2) Proceedings under this section may be brought by a person on his or her own behalf or on behalf of himself or herself and on behalf of other persons (with their consent), or a body corporate or unincorporated (with the consent of its committee or other controlling … body), having like or common interests in those proceedings.
I would like to share with you many of the gathered thoughts of Justice McClellan in his 2005 paper titled “Access to justice in environmental law: an Australian perspective”. He says:
When the Environmental Planning & Assessment Act was introduced into the Parliament—
the New South Wales parliament, 30 years ago—
the Minister said of the legislation that it would provide greater opportunities for public participation. The opposition spokesman … expressed a fear—
which would be familiar to members of this place—
that it would be inevitable that open standing would delay the processing of development applications.
Other members of the Parliament were troubled by s 123—
the standing provisions—
expressing concern about the possibility of the delay of development and mischievous proceedings. The Local Government Association and The Shires Association, representing the councils with primary responsibility for development control, were opposed to open standing.
In other places the provision was described as “opening the flood gates”, the constant theme being that open standing would be exploited by the mischievous individual or a commercial competitor, to delay and frustrate legitimate and lawful development.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video