Page 12 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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projects are proposed in Canberra. Commercial killing, while being one consideration, should never be the major consideration.
I will now talk a bit more about consultation. I refer to another quote, from the community group CPR—Canberrans for Power Station Relocation—which is still, I believe, in existence. They said:
Perhaps the biggest lesson the community has learned is that consultation is pointless, planning does not exist and the Government will have made its mind up long ago ...
I think that can only be described as a very sad and sorry indictment of how the community feel the government is listening or not listening to them. The government did say in its evidence that it had improved its consultation since then, and I actually think there is a degree of proof for that statement. Last night, along with my Assembly colleagues Mrs Dunne, Ms Porter and Mr Coe, I attended a consultation session run by the LDA about the fate of the Hawker shops. I would have to say that it was a vast step forward from what happened with the data centre. So I am hopeful that the government has taken these lessons to heart.
There are 18 recommendations from the committee and there are two basic themes to them: (1) you have got to do consultation better; (2) you have got to do strategic planning better. In the consultation one, we are saying that, as a minimum, the government should adhere to the current community engagement guidelines when consulting with the community on strategic projects.
In this case the government did not even adhere to their own guidelines. In this case, whether or not their guidelines were good enough does not even become the question because they did not even do what they said they were going to do, which is really regrettable. We have got a number of recommendations about how they can make the guidelines better, but the bottom line is to do what you committed to do in the first place.
We have recommended that the government report to the Assembly on or before the last sitting day in March 2011 about the effectiveness of the revised community engagement manual and the new criteria and process for consultation. We note that the government has been revising the community engagement manual for some time. During the process of this committee inquiry, we understood that the new manual was going to be released. But looking at the website, we still find there the 2005 version.
Another thing we looked at was the role of the strategic planning unit. This has changed, clearly, since the original inquiry because there is now a new department, the Department of Land and Property Services. We recommend a number of things in relation to this—that people be informed about what is happening with this, what the strategic planning criteria are, what the facilitation process is, and that the government listen to feedback about this.
It was also very obvious during this inquiry that there was a degree of confusion about the direct land sales, the direct grant of land process, in the government because we ended up with two departments claiming that they chaired the direct sales eligibility
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