Page 3203 - Week 10 - Thursday, 25 September 2014
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The bill I present today proposes editorial, technical, consequential and minor policy amendments to the Building Act 2004, Building (General) Regulation 2008, Planning and Development Act 2007 and Planning and Development Regulation 2008.
The bill responds to needs identified by the Environment and Planning Directorate and Parliamentary Counsel.
This bill includes four minor policy amendments. I would like to briefly discuss these minor policy amendments. This bill amends the Building Act to require building certifiers to prepare a notice when issuing a building approval for exempt development. This notice will explain why a development is considered to be exempt. It amends the Planning and Development Act to allow the minister to make changes to a development approval decided under the call-in power. It amends the notification requirements for an environmental significance opinion under the Planning and Development Act. The bill also amends the notice of direct sale requirements in the Planning and Development Act.
I will now discuss these amendments in further detail. Firstly, the bill makes a minor policy amendment to the Building Act and Building (General) Regulation. In May this year, the Auditor-General’s Office provided a performance audit report to this Assembly titled Auditor-General Performance Audit Report—Single Dwelling Development Assessments—Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate. The report examined single dwelling development assessments by what is now referred to as the Environment and Planning Directorate.
Recommendation 5 of the Auditor-General’s report called for the increase the transparency of decision-making by certifiers in relation to exempt development or—as they are referred to—“DA exempt”.
In this report, the Auditor-General suggested that a lack of documentation in some circumstances made it difficult to assess whether an accurate DA exemption assessment had been made by a certifier or building surveyor. The Auditor-General recommended that the directorate require building surveyors and certifiers to submit a minimum level of documentation, such as a checklist, in relation to DA exempt assessments.
The amendments contained in this bill concern those developments that are exempt from requiring development approval and go to addressing the issues raised by the Auditor-General.
Currently, under existing sections 29 and 30 of the Building Act, the certifier cannot issue a building approval unless the site works involved have development approval or are DA exempt. The proposed reforms therefore are being made to strengthen the documentation requirements relating to this assessment by the certifier.
I would like to take a moment to define “site work” for the benefit of the Assembly as it is relevant to the bill. “Site work” is a defined term under the Building Act, which includes the construction of the relevant building work and other work that is separate
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