Page 2225 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 23 June 2010
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interest in planning to be able to make comments or potentially appeal about planning decisions.
There are lots of people who are interested in planning but do not happen to live next-door to the development in question, and I would point out a few things. There already is a provision in the existing ACAT act which we are not planning to change which allows vexatious appeals to be dismissed. This bill is about extending appeal rights to people with legitimate rights.
Mr Barr said something about the fact that this bill would mean there was no time frame for ACAT appeals. In fact, we have no intention of changing the time frame. There is still a time limit of 28 days. Also, this bill does not attempt to change the current restriction on appeals in town centres. I think that really both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party have introduced some sort of straw man, of people who want to just spend their spare time appealing against things for no reason.
As Ms Hunter said, we have no evidence to suggest that the people of the ACT actually want to spend their time or spend their money going to ACAT. As Ms Hunter said, the appeal rights which we are attempting to introduce are already in existence in other states such as New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory and the development industry is still continuing in these places. They are not being held up for years and years in the appeals court.
What we have in the ACT is that ACAT, instead of spending its time looking at matters of substance, must spend some of its time looking at matters of standing. This is just not a good use of ACAT’s time. Since I have tabled this bill as part of the amendments to the ACAT act in April, we now have a new law whereby you cannot be joined to a case if you do not have standing in your own right. This clause in the act reads:
The tribunal must not join a person as a new applicant to an application if the person is not entitled to apply to the tribunal under the authorising law under which the application is made.
I am aware of one case already where a community group, which unfortunately did not have the relevant parts in their association but was genuinely concerned with an application, was not able to join to an appeal.
This is very concerning. There are many instances where it may be appropriate to join parties to a case. There may be a number of people, as is the case in Latham, who are concerned, have the same sort of concerns about a particular development, and they do not all live the right distance from the site. Excluding the people just does not make sense. All this is appearing to try to do is to keep people out of the democratic process.
I will now move on to the community councils’ motion. On 18 March this year the combined community councils held a meeting to discuss my planning bill. This was very significant as this is the first time the community councils have all come together for a combined meeting for the last three or four years. The community councils are
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