Page 4239 - Week 13 - Thursday, 27 November 2014
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There are certainly quite a few matters that relate to the conservator’s role, or lack thereof, in various processes within the Planning and Development Act. Today in this place is probably not the place to discuss them in great detail, but, suffice to say, the conservator should have a stronger role in planning processes and decisions. We will come back to that at another time.
The role of the Conservator of Flora and Fauna is important, as this role delivers key advice on biodiversity to various government agencies under many pieces of legislation, including the Planning and Development Act. We know that the government agrees that the role of the conservator is very important, as it commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to look into the functions of the role in 2011.
The subsequent report on their review of the role and functions of the conservator delivered a range of findings and 10 recommendations. One of the findings was that there was considerable community concern that the conservator’s power in relation to planning and development was too narrow and lacked sufficient teeth and that ACTPLA could essentially ignore the conservator’s advice.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the legislation before us today is that the government has not taken on many of the recommendations of this PwC report in relation to conservator concurrence or conservator role in planning decisions. That is, there should be greater transparency for decision-makers to show how they have taken on the advice of the conservator and, if not, what the reasons for this are. In particular, the recommendation that the government consider how to strengthen the role of the conservator is one that does need to be further addressed. ACTPLA should have to accept the advice of the conservator and not have the power to override it as reflected in the current legislation and, unfortunately, quite often in practice.
This will be even more important as this bill removed the existing overlap of a developer potentially needing to apply for both a nature conservation licence under this legislation as well as a development application through the planning act. Instead, the proponent will only need to apply for a DA and any conservator advice will be through that channel.
This bill creates a shared ACT government agenda for nature conservation that applies to all agencies that manage nature conservation issues, currently within both TAMS and EPD. Over time these agencies will no doubt change names and structures, but this legislation clearly underpins the objects, roles, functions and relationships between the conservator and the Parks and Conservation Service. This bill lends itself to EPD and TAMS functioning as an integrated conservation agency.
Although the Greens do not think this is necessarily the perfect bill, we do believe it is a good basis for biodiversity policy management and protection and welcome the significant advances that have been made in this legislation. It is much improved biodiversity protection legislation. Aside from those two issues I have mentioned around offsets and conservator concurrence, we can be confident that we are well placed to face the challenges and impacts of climate change, increased pest species and decreased habitat on our precious places, species and ecosystems. This legislation
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