Page 3167 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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Another ACTPLA program I am very interested in is the sustainable futures program. That seems to have done some quite innovative work. The fruits of this are being seen in the current rush of draft territory plan variations. I understand that there will soon be some community engagement processes run by ACTPLA as part of this in relation to human settlement. These will feed into the spatial plan. I think that, as I said, more consultation along these sorts of lines is a very good thing.
In terms of the new spatial plan, one of my questions would be: how is that going to integrate with the other work that is happening in the Assembly? I refer here, first, to the work that will soon be done by the climate change and environment committee in examining the ecological carrying capacity for the ACT and the region. Given that that is intimately related, I would have thought, to the spatial plan, I would very much hope that this work would be taken up by ACTPLA and integrated.
I know that ACTPLA has a deadline for COAG in January 2012, but I do believe there is still time for ACTPLA to consider the climate change committee’s recommendations. On a more smaller scale, prosaic level, I am quite interested in how the planning committee’s work on inner north redevelopment, which is ongoing, will be integrated into what actually happens on the ground and how ACTPLA plans for the inner north.
We also need to ensure that the other related government policies are in line with ACTPLA’s density and transport orientated development policies, or at least their official policies. There is no point putting more and more people into suburbs if we are not going to deliver to these people any facilities, if we are not going to deliver them a decent public transport system to get them to work, to get them to town and to get to childcare or wherever they need to go. We need to stop the situation where planning and transport are separate. We need to start planning for the two of them together. It would be really great if the next iteration of the sustainable transport plan or the next iteration of the spatial plan integrated the two. This is what needs to happen for our city going forward.
I would like to quickly talk about the building certification and construction standards. I say “quickly” because we did have a debate on this subject earlier today. Of course, we are very pleased that the government has introduced the COLA legislation. I note that the mandatory disclosure legislation that Mr Barr alluded to, which started 11 years ago, was the brainchild of one of the earlier Green MLAs, Kerrie Tucker. I would also like to mention that last year—I think in April—the Assembly passed the Greens’ motion asking for auditing of energy efficiency ratings because the system clearly is not working at present. I am very pleased that the government is coming on board in terms of energy efficiency assessment ratings and certification of assessors.
In terms of the building quality itself, we spoke about this at some length this morning. It is something that I have been interested in for a long time and something that clearly has been a community interest for a long time. Recently there have been the Stateline programs, but it was clearly an issue well before that. The government took quite a long time to respond to calls from the community as well as the questioning from the Greens and the OCN.
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