Page 718 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 2010
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need to be concerned about is actually achieving it—not just the good words which Mr Barr has written here. I will go through and talk about some of the issues which he has raised. Firstly, he says that his statement of planning intent in 2007 was addressing climate change. I guess I would have to say there is a fair degree of scepticism as to the efficacy of planning systems addressing climate change to date.
I would like to make particular comment about the compact city through the development of the compact block code. This is an area where we need to look at what has happened in practice. While the ideas behind it seem quite sensible, we need to look at what this is doing in terms of solar access, space for kids, in particular, to play and green space and whether the idea of having lots of little houses on little blocks—houses made out of ticky-tacky all lined up in a row, as the song says—is the way to go or whether we need to look at different built form—for instance, more row housing and terrace housing.
Moving right along to the points in Mr Barr’s statement, his first dot point is that the government’s intent is to drive change to planning policy through the sustainable future program. This seems like a very interesting program. My question is: how does that get involved with the rest of the planning system? In fact, the sustainable future program produced whole-of-government recommendations. I would really like to hear how ACTPLA is going to be driving the whole-of-government plans which it talks about in the sustainable future program.
Mr Barr’s statement goes on to a number of dot points about solar access rights and legislation. I am very pleased to see these in Mr Barr’s statement. As Mr Barr would be aware, these were part of the agreement between the Greens and the ALP when the ALP formed government. We have, in fact, been quite disappointed that these changes have not already been introduced, given that it is about 18 months since the Stanhope government took office. I would like to see work on this considerably hastened. Obviously, the next point of evaluating and reviewing the Canberra spatial plan to ensure that it is responsive and can deliver on the key principles would seem a good idea.
The next point—working with the community and industry to implement, over the next 10 years, carbon targets for entire estates—again, seems a useful idea. The issue here, of course, is going to be what are the targets. I hope that the government, in doing this, will bear in the mind the commitment which has already been made by Minister Corbell, that by 2060 the ACT will be carbon neutral. I would like to see that being the target for the estates. That is where we have decided as a community we have to end up so we may as well plan for that now rather than attempt to retrofit estates in the future so they can be carbon neutral. It will be cheaper both in the long run and in the short run to have good development up front. I note that is an area where the Liberal Party, in particular, have been debating with us the usefulness of planning up-front for houses which use less energy and for estates which will require less energy to be spent, estates which will be more liveable. We think this is the way to go. I am glad to see that the government seems to be moving in the same direction with carbon targets for entire estates. I would like to see the sorts of targets which we know we will need for the future.
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