Page 1898 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2011
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and bad. It means that, unfortunately, often people find it hard to use when they first start, because they usually first start because there has been a development somewhere nearby, they do not like the look of it and they start in sort of at the deep end.
The design and build section has information that everybody needs but it is not obvious that that is the information that you actually want to go to at the beginning. “Development applications—a quick guide” is one of the most useful things on the ACTPLA site but again is somewhat buried and many people may not find it at the moment at which they need it, i.e., usually the first time they go to the ACTPLA site.
Another issue is that information about development applications on the ACTPLA website generally does not have a summary of the proposal, especially for lease variations. A summary would be useful, because sometimes you have a hundred documents with some DAs and it is quite hard often to work out which is the document that you should open to actually give you an idea about what on earth it is that this DA is about. And often people waste a lot of time opening the wrong things and just do not realise what the plot is. A summary would be useful for these applications.
A summary would also be very useful in the information which is sent around each week by ACTPLA to the community councils. They send around a list of the DAs which they think might be controversial, but the list does not have a description as to what is in the DA and does not have a link to that DA on ACTPLA’s website. My suspicion is that many community councils, who do not of course have a lot of resources, do not go through and actually investigate what is in that notification.
If ACTPLA spent an hour or two more each week putting in a little more information, I think it would pay off in the long term, because it would mean the community councils would notice at the beginning that, yes, these are the ones which are likely to cause angst in our community and make sure that people know about them in enough time to actually consider the application, consider whether they really have a problem and make a considered response rather than a knee-jerk response at the end. I think in general we do have to look at our methods of notification.
A year or so ago a private group put together a notification system so that you could be notified of DAs that were within a geographic area. I subscribed to it. This seems to have ceased. I am not quite sure who was funding it but this is the sort of thing that I would like to see the government look at when it looks at the government 2.0 motion, which we passed in the Assembly a few weeks ago, because this was done by the group who did it just by screen-scraping off the ACTPLA website. ACTPLA could easily set up a notification system so that you were notified electronically of all the DAs that are within a kilometre of your house or something like that. And that would, for the people who are interested in planning, probably cover a lot.
But one of the biggest problems with notification of course is that most people actually are not that interested in planning until something happens in their immediate neighbourhood. So we need to look at ways, apart from a small notice in the Canberra Times and the notice actually on the development, of notification. I do note the community engagement section in the Canberra Times has been a big plus and maybe
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