Page 3494 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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easier, safer, more culturally enriching and more sustainable environmentally, culturally and socially. I could go on, but I will not.
We also need, of course, to communicate better with the people of the ACT about the planning that goes on in the territory. Some people would describe me as a planning nerd, or a geek if you want, but regardless of the fact that I have spent the last four years as the ACT Greens’ planning spokesperson, I still find the sheer size and difficulty of reading the territory plan and the associated documents really hard. And I think that most people in Canberra find the sheer quantity of the language in which all of this is written quite intimidating and it results in the lack of engagement, both on a neighbourhood level and in shaping the direction of the territory. It interacts at the higher level.
Nonetheless, planning is important. The planning authority has to take into account things like expected impacts of population change, climate change and mitigation strategies and peak oil. We will need changes to our urban form, and we currently have the aim, for instance, of a fifty-fifty greenfields infill development. We are getting 70-30. This will need to change if we are to become a more sustainable city. We think that the government needs to do a lot more work to explain to people what is happening in the environment and the potential changes.
I think this is really important because part of the social licence for changes is people understanding why the changes are needed and people appreciating that the system, while they may not totally agree with it, is a fair system. It is the same in every part of our human existence. We need to feel we are included and that there is general agreement for what is happening. Our planning system is like that.
One of the things that I have worked very hard at is getting better consultation and notification about developments. I note the most recent changes in terms of suburban development. I am hopeful that the recent changes will reduce the angst in some of the suburbs.
I am concerned, though, in terms of the planning process, that particularly we are not doing enough about climate change through this. As we all know, in October 2010, the Assembly passed the Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act 2010, which required emissions to be reduced by 40 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, based on 1990 levels.
This legislation needs to be reflected in our territory plan. It is very hard to see how we could possibly meet these targets without significant changes to our planning system, and there really is little evidence to suggest that these changes have happened. In fact, the government said, in its response to the Assembly’s inquiry into ACT greenhouse gas reduction targets, that a task force would be established to review the planning and building regulations to identify opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This, the minister recently told us, was, in fact, pursued by the building quality task force rather than by the dedicated task force they said there would be, which was to report by June 2010. Some two years since the work should have been available, nothing has happened. This is very depressing.
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