Page 1493 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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centres were a very key feature of Canberra’s early planning, but their initial role is changing as lifestyles change and the demands that are placed on our city evolve. As has occurred with Jamison, it is vital that we, as an Assembly, plan for that change and that we ensure that our local and our group centres do not struggle but in fact remain viable. In doing that we must ensure the centres have the capacity to adapt to change, and that means ensuring a greater level of flexibility in land uses and urban form.
Tomorrow I will be outlining the government’s response to the Assembly’s motion on the preparation of a master plan priority program for the territory. Perhaps in the context of that and in this debate tonight the question I would pose to fellow members is this: are we going to commit ourselves to this significant undertaking, which will be many years and many millions of dollars, if we are going to undertake a full and comprehensive master planning process of the kind I will outline tomorrow? If we are going do that, are we then going to suffer political opportunism in several years time—maybe not three or four but longer; maybe five or 10 years time—after the plans have been completed and worked through an extensive process in the community and in this place, and suffer claims, at that point in time, that consultation has not occurred when, in fact, we have been through an extensive multi-year multi-million dollar process?
It was, in part, in response to some of those issues why the independent planning body was established—to remain objective in the analysis of proposals against those exact policy settings that are made by this place that will endure for years after the political attention has perhaps moved away from them and, importantly, to assess development applications against those policy decisions that were taken in this place, often many years previously.
This is, I think, particularly the case in Jamison. The developments in that centre, including recent developments and those that are proposed for the future, are being guided and informed by the 2002 Jamison master plan. It is a master plan which, as stated in its introduction, establishes “a framework for sustainable growth and rejuvenation of the centre for the next 10 to 20 years”. This 2002 Jamison master plan was subject to nearly two years of consultation.
The notion that we face that developments which emerge later—in this case nine years after that master planning process has taken place—have occurred in a vacuum of consultation is, I think, unfair. Whilst planning processes will always precede development, often by many years, it is unreasonable to expect them to forecast the precise nature of each development application. Rather, the role of the master plan is to lay the framework in which appropriate development can be encouraged and assessed.
The response specifically to Mr Coe’s question is that in March 2003 the spatial and land use planning recommendations of the Jamison master plan were given statutory effect in variation 202 to the territory plan. So, Mr Coe, it is the territory plan that enables redevelopment proposals to be considered by ACTPLA. This place—prior to you, me, Ms Le Couteur and Mr Hanson, including you, Mr Speaker; I think Mr Stanhope would be the only member in the chamber now who was actually in this
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