Page 1525 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2017
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I think we would agree, would be inappropriate to build on community facility zoned land, because they are for an industrial purpose.
Similarly, these are some of the objections why people do not believe community facility zoned land should be used for residential land. However you dress it up, building houses—public housing, supportive housing, social housing, community housing, affordable housing, no matter what you call it—is still residential going onto community facility zoned land.
In practice what has happened here is that a technical amendment, which is allowed under section 87 of the act, where a variation or an error variation that would not adversely affect anyone’s right, if approved, has as its only object the correction of a formal error in the plan, a variation to change the boundary et cetera, has been used. These are the things that technical amendments can be used for, and there is a lot of community concern that a technical amendment has been used to allow residential development on community facility zoned land. A variation is allowed to clarify the language in the Territory Plan if it does not change the substance of the plan. Everyone I have spoken to in relation to this technical amendment believes it does change the substance of the Territory Plan.
We have spoken about the fact that back in 2005 an Assembly planning and environment committee held an inquiry and recognised that some community facility zoned land was underutilised and had the capacity to provide greater benefit to the community rather than sit unused. At that time, after that Assembly inquiry, there was a change to the definition of community facility zoned land to include supportive housing. That was made so that housing for the aged and people with disability could be built on community facility zoned land.
Social housing and supportive housing have quite different definitions. The technical amendment in 2015, which was very quietly put through just before Christmas that year, allowing the government to use CFZ land for public housing, happened because the government knew from the public housing renewal task force—and we have seen this through the FOI information that has been released—that the proposed building of public housing was not allowed under the current Territory Plan. So they put through this technical amendment so that they could use community facility zoned land for public housing.
The documents discovered under FOI show, I believe, that the government knew that the changes were not just clarifying the language but in fact changing the substance and the intent of the Territory Plan, which goes against section 87, which is what a technical amendment is allowed to be used for. The FOI showed that questions had been raised and the government made these changes in the quietest possible way to limit public knowledge and in fact limit the knowledge of members of the Assembly that this change was going through. It did not come before the Assembly.
Under section 88 of the Planning and Development Act 2007 this type of technical amendment is subject to limited public consultation and in this case the public was notified through a newspaper notice.
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