Page 1882 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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This is the second petition on this issue. Last September I presented a petition on behalf of more than 500 Red Hill residents requesting that the ACT government review the effect of draft variation 334 on the Red Hill community and surrounding suburbs. The ACT government’s response was underwhelming, to say the least, and, frankly, insulting. The minister for planning was very slow to respond, and in fact did so only in December 2015, after the Assembly had risen for the summer break.
After Minister Gentleman tabled his response in the Assembly in February, I circulated it to the Red Hill community. Their overwhelming view was that the minister’s response was wholly inadequate and that the community’s overwhelming rejection of the rezoning of the Red Hill public housing estate to RZ5 would be ignored.
The community’s rejection of DV334 should have been obvious to the minister, as 93 of the 97 formal submissions were against such high density development. The minister’s and the government’s blatant disregard for overwhelming opposition to the scale and bulk of the development enabled by DV334 was again on display when the minister approved the variation in February this year.
He disingenuously claimed he had listened to the concerns of the community and reduced the height from six storeys to four storeys. What the minister failed to announce to the media and to residents on that day was that he had agreed to the insertion of an “additional storey clause” which enables a future developer to build an additional storey, not just on the four-storey sections but on all the other sections of the site. So areas previously constrained to two storeys are now enabled for three storeys, and areas previously restricted to three storeys are now enabled for four storeys.
The minister also failed to announce that, in doing so, he had engineered the wholesale removal of all but two of the desired character statements. Those desired character statements are one of the primary mechanisms which guide the overall appearance and acceptability of any future development and underpin the rights of the surrounding community and all ACT residents to obtain a sensible outcome on the site.
The Red Hill community are calling on the minister and this government to explain to the community who requested the additional storey clause and who requested the removal of the desired character statements. My colleague Alistair Coe and I met with Red Hill residents in February to listen to their concerns and assure them that, should we win government this year, our plans for the site would be based on RZ3 zoning.
Today, through this petition, the residents are asking that the scale of the development be restricted so as not to impact on roads and schools, and that the height of the development be restricted to minimise its impact on the community.
In the Assembly in March I moved that variation 334 be rejected. Minister Rattenbury failed his own constituents again by again siding with the government. However, he did indicate that he had brokered a deal with the minister for planning that would see the reinsertion of desired character statements through a technical amendment.
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