Page 3328 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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The ACT government has a number of plans in place that operate at different levels to guide the nature of the development. They are, in theory, supportive of ensuring that environmental values of areas are preserved.
The Canberra spatial plan launched in 2004 was meant to be the foundation upon which the city would make strategic decisions about how we develop the city so as to build in, amongst other things, environmental sustainability. The spatial plan was never intended to be a comprehensive or detailed planning document, but, rather, a framework document that would guide other planning decisions. The Canberra spatial plan states:
The location of future residential development will ensure that areas identified as having significant biodiversity values, such as threatened species and ecological communities and habitat for threatened species, are protected from development.
But when we talk about environmental sustainability, whilst it is useful to have the broad concepts laid out in a macro-planning document, often we find that we get down to the specifics of any one development and developers are put in the position of not being able to move forward with a development because of problems that have seemingly emerged late in the day, such as an issue about the location of habitat for a particular species of a small reptile or an endangered grasshopper. And yet, we really do have very good information already about why not only these species are important but also the habitats they live in, the priority of those habitats in both a regional and national context and what we should be doing to protect those habitats.
There is no reason why we cannot integrate this information into our planning at a more detailed level so that site-by-site debates are less frequent and so developers are clear about environmental obstacles before pursuing a development application. Not only would this provide developers with certainty, but it would also provide certainty to those groups who work very hard in our community to protect the environmental values of areas around the fringes of our cities.
As such, one of the objectives that would be useful for the ACT government would be that of putting aside areas now that we are going to commit to protecting or managing in a different way and taking those areas off the board as potential future urban areas. There are a number of reasons why an area may be unsuitable for urban development, and the subject of today’s motion—the proposed development of Throsby—actually demonstrates many of these reasons perfectly.
Throsby is the perfect case in point of the kind of area for which we should perhaps just put aside all notion of development. Whilst our motion today does not call for this specifically to happen as the work has not been finished that will determine this final decision, the Greens’ view is that Throsby may well be a complete no-go zone. There are so many issues with this particular site that we think that, had there been detailed biodiversity mapping and had we already had recommendations in regard to ecological connectivity translated to planning documentation, such an area would not ever have been mooted for development. Even the physical location between two important nature reserves and the size and shape of the spit of the land that bifurcates those reserves ring warning bells for us.
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