Page 1211 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 2013
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difference of opinion with the government on this. We said that people’s enjoyment of their property should be protected: where a development impacts on someone’s enjoyment of their private property, they should have certain rights. They should have the ability to raise objections, to appeal in certain circumstances.
The government went further than that and said that actually anyone whose enjoyment of the land—I remember the language exactly—is affected should be able to have appeal rights. What they have applied to private citizens undertaking private developments is this: someone who has no connection to that development, who is nowhere near that development, potentially has the ability to appeal that development. The principle they are applying to the community is that. When it comes to themselves—and, let us face it, most of this is going to be still done by the government—they are saying that that does not apply. And when we are talking about public land, and in many cases we are going to be talking about developments on public land, they are saying to the community that the community has no right to object and the ordinary development application process should not be followed.
We see a real disconnect in the way the government are approaching this. They made a rationale for urgent stimulus spending; they made a rationale for changes and suspension of certain appeal rights as a result of that. That time has now passed. Those projects are now finished. We do not believe it is reasonable to say to people in the suburbs of Canberra, “The government can now trample all over your rights, but, by the way, if you are doing a private development, we will leave open the possibility that someone who has no connection to that development should be able to appeal it, and should be able to potentially stop it or slow it down.”
For all those reasons, we will not be supporting this move by the government today.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.53): I am very pleased that this issue is arising in the Assembly today. This is a very unusual motion, in ways that Mr Corbell has already outlined, in that it must pass in order for the regulations to be put forward. Most regulations under the Planning and Development Act come in as either notifiable or disallowable instruments, but this one has been established differently. It is a legacy of the fast-tracking process that was established in 2009 to allow many building projects from the federal stimulus package which followed the 2008 global financial crisis, such as schools and public housing, to be fast-tracked through the ACT planning system. This fast-tracking included things like exempting certain developments from third-party appeals or simply from needing development applications at all.
The process that was built into the system in 2009 included ensuring that the regulations which allowed this fast-tracking for school site developments would have a sunset clause and would be reviewable in four years time. It seems that time flies, and the review period is now upon us. Accordingly, the government has engaged a consultant to review the DA exemptions, and the review can now be found on the legislation register. This is possibly one of the most transparent exemption approval processes this Assembly has.
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