Page 799 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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Then, as Ms Porter mentioned, we went into the deconcessionalisation issue. The committee was very clear. Deconcessionalisation, per se, was not part of our remit, but deconcessionalisation is caught up with the territory plan variation. If the Brumbies had no desire to change the use of the block, then there would not have been any need to do the deconcessionalisation. As Ms Porter said, we have actually made three recommendations about deconcessionalisation. While I admit that the process is quite likely better than the process was in the past, I gather from evidence from ACTPLA that this is the first time that a deconcessionalisation has happened under the Planning Act 2007 and that prior to that all that was required was an exchange of letters.
So the current process quite probably is better than the previous process. However, it still does not seem to be as good as it could be. It clearly has issues with notification. It clearly has issues with people understanding the process. And to the best of my understanding, it is a process on which you cannot appeal to ACAT, unlike most other planning decisions. That is also a problem. It does not seem that the hurdles that were put in the legislation about looking at the public interest as far as deconcessionalisation and alternative views are concerned have been looked at very well. And I think that is an issue. It is clearly outside the remit of this particular inquiry, but it is something which I think we need to look at more.
One of the issues that were talked about a lot in the community with regard to this was the issue of spot rezoning and whether this was rezoning. Clearly it is spot rezoning insofar as we are only rezoning part of a suburb. This is not a whole-of-territory rezoning. I do agree that this is to some degree something of an issue. I recently went to a community consultation about a totally different place. It is a piece of land which is currently open space and there is a proposal for residential. And the comment from some of the community was that when all the houses around are knocked down and the area is rebuilt and the area is more dense, we are going to want the open space, which sort of made sense, except the zoning around this block was virtually entirely RZ1. So that simply is not going to happen. I think it is 10 years on from the garden city variation, but it is something we need to start thinking about.
While I imagine members have not actually read all the details of my Planning and Development (Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets) Bill, which I presented yesterday, one of the things it talked about was requiring ACTPLA to do a revision of the territory plan to ensure that it was, in fact, compatible with our greenhouse gas emission targets. And I think that if that was to happen and we really looked to that, then some of these issues of spot rezoning might be overcome. But I do take the community’s point that it is an issue.
So I commend this report to the Assembly but possibly even more than that to the community and to the planning minister. It has not been an easy report to do. I am aware that probably we have succeeded in not pleasing anyone in the community or the planning minister. Nonetheless, I think we have done as good a job as we possibly could, given the competing interests.
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