Page 4770 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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strategy to deliver a city that is compact and efficient, diverse, sustainable and resilient, livable and accessible.
Unit living helps to deliver on the aims of the ACT planning strategy. People are located close to jobs and transport, allowing them to ride or walk to work and providing shops, cafes, and services close to home. Unit living in Canberra keeps the urban footprint compact and creates livable communities. Up-to-date and effective unit title laws and processes are necessary to support the variety of residential and commercial users of new developments and for realising their potential to provide an effective housing choice.
In August of this year Minister Ramsay and I announced the work being done by the government through the managing buildings better reforms. I am pleased to provide the Assembly with an update on the progress of the important work the government is doing to enable us to have a modern and robust framework to govern unit living.
In collaboration with my colleague Minister Ramsay I share in the opportunity to introduce the Unit Titles Legislation Amendment Bill 2019 to the Assembly. We initiated a reform project for units plan developments in response to the growing need to address issues affecting units plans and, in particular, the increasing number of developments that incorporate both residential and commercial uses. The focus of the project is to improve the governance and management arrangements for units plan developments, including developments that cater for multiple uses as well as units plan developments in general.
We know that investing in an apartment or a business is a big financial decision for people and that they want to know what they are buying into. We have heard that owners, developers and commercial operators are concerned about inequities between residential and commercial unit owners. We have heard that people want to invest and live in units that are well maintained.
We began consulting with the community in 2016 to thoroughly understand what the issues are, what effect they have and the possible solutions to address them. During 2016-17 we listened to the concerns of unit owners and residents, body corporate managers, developers and legal practitioners. This engagement process identified complex matters ranging from prohibitive decision-making procedures, inequitable costs arrangements between residential and commercial unit owners and the need for improvement in the initial planning and design of units plan buildings.
We also heard that there is a need to address administrative processes and management to deliver significant improvements to the function of all units plans. It is evident from the feedback from stakeholders and the community that reforms are necessary to improve the livability and management of units plan developments into the future. Furthermore, the increasing number of new units plan developments being constructed or proposed for construction means that now is the time to ensure that our laws cater for the immediate and future needs in the planning, design, building and management of these complexes.
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