Page 5065 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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depending on the nature of a proposal and whether it is assessed on the merit or impact tracks, the public notification period for a development application must be held for 10 to 15 days. This may involve the use of signage, newspaper announcements or letters to adjoining properties.
I note that the new provisions in this bill apply to errors in notification. According to the explanatory statement:
The Act as amended will require the public notification to be repeated in certain situations. … public notification must be repeated if:
a) the notice (letter, sign on property or newspaper notice) is defective because the content is incorrect, incomplete, misleading and ACTPLA considers the defect is likely to detract from someone’s awareness of the proposal or restrict the ability of someone to comment on the proposal; and
b) ACTPLA becomes aware of the defect and its impact during the original public notification period.
Further, the bill will require public notification to be repeated if the notification did not take place at all and if the authority becomes aware of this before the public consultation period ends. The Canberra Liberals have consulted industry about this bill and no serious concerns have been raised with us. We will therefore be supporting the bill.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.01): The Greens will be supporting the planning and development amendment bill today. However, I note that we discussed this exact same topic in this chamber only a few months ago in June. I will discuss the contents of the bill in a moment, but I think it is very important that first I address a fundamental problem that we have in the Assembly. It is an issue which was addressed in the editorial of the Canberra Times last week, which is that we are a three-party Assembly and we need to work collaboratively to get legislation and motions passed. We cannot just work as individual parties and presume that is good enough.
Voting against a bill because it is not yours is simply immature. When we debated my Planning and Development (Notifications and Review) Amendment Bill in June, it would have made a lot more sense for the government or even the Liberal Party, given that they are now going to support the bill today, to amend our bill. Mr Barr said in his speech that he wanted to fix the same notification problem in the planning act, and he foreshadowed it at the time. However, rather than amending my bill or even asking for an adjournment to allow ACTPLA time to consider their approach, he and the Liberal Party voted my bill down in principle. He voted the principle of my bill down, despite introducing a bill which addressed one of these exact same issues just two months later.
It is childish and frustrating that the government is unable to debate an issue when it is proposed by another party and then, only two months after we finished the debate on it, tables a bill which covers exactly the same issues. It tabled a bill that covers public notification and addresses it in almost exactly the same way. I find it difficult to
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