Page 720 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 2010
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legislation passed was only for new houses. I am very pleased to see that the Labor Party is supporting it. I regret very much that it did not support the legislation a year ago so that this could have been happening earlier in the ACT.
The next point I would like to make is that the government’s aim in the Canberra spatial plan is to achieve 50 per cent of all new development by 2030 within 7½ kilometres of the city plan. I believe this is, in fact, the current aim, not just an aim by 2030. My question to Mr Barr is: how much of that is happening now? How much of our development is greenfields and how much of it is infill? Next he goes on to talk about building on the work we have already undertaken in areas such as Woden, Belconnen, Gungahlin and Braddon—“we will investigate ways of repairing our town centres and group centres for the future”. I was really surprised on reading this that we did not mention Civic in this list. Is Civic not the number one centre of Canberra?
Mr Hargreaves: No, Tuggeranong town centre is.
MS LE COUTEUR: Okay—second only, possibly, to Tuggeranong town centre, Mr Hargreaves. Civic is an area which, it would be almost universally agreed, needs better planning. I continually get people saying, “Why is there no master plan for Civic?” I have had this conversation with ACTPLA who have told me that, because of the issues with the National Capital Authority, the only master plan they can have is the Griffin legacy. I note, of course, that even the federal parliament has suggested that the Griffin legacy should not be adopted—that is, when there was a joint parliamentary inquiry into it in the house on the hill.
Civic is clearly an area which needs better planning. The document which the government put out a couple of weeks ago on the greater Civic was not a master plan. It could not be described as a master plan. It was probably a budget plan for TAMS and as such it has some use, but Civic desperately needs some more inclusive planning. Civic is the centre for the inhabitants of Canberra, as distinct from parliament, which is the centre for the parliamentary part of Canberra. The citizens of Canberra need more involvement in planning Civic. People really do not know what the future of Civic is.
Next I move on to the statement’s comments about the appeals system and balancing the rights of the community with the rights of the individual. I am surprised that Mr Barr did not mention the rights of the developers and property owners, because I think those rights also need to be balanced in this. I have to agree with him that is very difficult to correctly get the balance between the various property rights in this system. I note in passing that I introduced a bill to change the balance to a very small extent because I do not think we have got it right as yet.
I would also note that when we are talking about the appeals system one of the issues is the territory plan. The territory plan has a lot of objectives in it which, generally speaking, are all very good things which almost everybody would agree with. The problem, as I said before, is that the devil is in the detail. A lot of the objectives are not expressed in any way as rules in the territory plan. So when ACTPLA comes to evaluate a DA and the DA—if it does—goes to ACAT on appeal, often only the rules are looked at, not the objectives of the territory plan. This is a considerable oversight. It is something which I talk about in my planning and development legislation.
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