Page 3498 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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Canberrans are practical people. They love their open spaces. They love their environment. They want to see it looked after. Let us have a look at the state of our lakes under this Labor-Greens government. The state of our lakes is a nice measure of our local environment. Without fail, we have seen lakes around Canberra in a worse state now than they have ever been. These are challenging things to deal with, but when you are focusing on the wrong things, when you are focusing on banning plastic bags or solar feed-in schemes, you are not getting the practical environmental solutions. You are not working on how we improve our waste facilities to ensure we have better recycling. That has been, I think, the great failure. That has been a significant failing over these last few years.
The Canberra Liberals very much support practical environmental solutions. The test for an environmental policy from the Canberra Liberals’ point of view is: does the evidence say it will work? Does the evidence say it will improve our environment? Is it cost effective? Is it the right environmental solution? That is how we will do things. That is how we will do things in government.
I want to talk a bit about our planning system. There is much that can be said, but we have not seen any improvement. We know that all the reports that have come through say that we have not. We have seen various reports from the Auditor-General talking about our planning system. We saw a relatively recent audit, in June, saying that the Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate did not meet the statutory processing time frames in the majority of complex development applications reviewed by the audit. You have got to ask the question: after 11 years, are we getting it right in planning?
We have looked at this in areas such as supermarket policy. We have looked at the political interference in the planning process. Mr Corbell interfered recently in the planning process through the use of a call in. That is an appropriate interference in the planning process, and in some cases that can help get things done. But the kind of interference we have seen outside that official process, the kind of things Mr Savery was raising, did not help things go smoothly. What they saw was a process that got bogged down for years.
That kind of political interference leads to poor outcomes for the community. If you are going to interfere, if you are going to make political decisions, do it in the proper way. Do it by setting the policy, by changing the legislation, by changing the territory plan, by using the call-in powers where that is appropriate. Do not do it through interfering inappropriately in a statutory planning process that is meant to be at arm’s length from government.
That was the concern Neil Savery raised, and that is something that we believe needs significant work if Canberrans are again to have some faith in our planning system.
It is very important that we get this right. We get it right by respecting the process that we have. The broad framework of legislation that we have for planning is reasonable. There are some pretty significant improvements that we can make to it, and we will. But the legislation is not the biggest problem here in the ACT; it is the way the planning system has been administered in recent times.
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