Page 956 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 May 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
ACTPLA website after the development application has been approved or otherwise. The planning committee which I was on in the Seventh Assembly called for that then. We are still calling for it. It is particularly frustrating because we are all pretty confident that ACTPLA keeps copies of all the DA documentation and it is totally unclear why it does not continue to make that available for the public.
There are lots of recommendations along those lines. I am not quite sure if I should pick out a few of my favourites. You can relax: I am not going to read out all 66. I am sure you will all thank me for that.
One of the recommendations that we most felt we had to make was about the fact that, apparently, ACTPLA cannot reject a DA just because there is something in it which is actually false. You would have thought that they would have been able to but, as members of the public repeatedly told us, and as ACTPLA noted, their legislation did not allow them to do this.
If all the recommendations are acted on, I think there will be a lot less conflict between the community and the development community because there will be better consultation. People will know why things are happening, and people will not feel that the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
The 66 recommendations were agreed to by the entire committee. They are all brilliant recommendations. I trust that the government will take them very seriously and that ACTPLA will put every financial consequence in its budget submission. The committee noted that ACTPLA now has more resources, and we think that is great, but the government’s changes, while positive, have not been enough to address all the issues.
I want to turn to some additional comments that I made. I specifically made comments about development in the low-rise residential areas, the RZ1 and the RZ2 areas. These are the areas where we have a lot of community angst. We have the angst for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the procedures for doing development applications are not as good as they should be. That has been dealt with to quite an extent in the body of the main part of the report. But people also spoke at great length to us about the fact that what is being developed in the RZ1 and RZ2 areas is not what they want to see. I would like to make recommendations about what should happen in those areas, but that is outside the scope of this inquiry. However, I do make additional recommendations.
Firstly, I recommend that the government look at reforming the planning requirements so that we do not have developments which damage the amenity of existing neighbourhoods.
Even more compelling for the terms of reference of this inquiry is the fact that there are currently development application exemptions for dwelling extensions and knockdown-rebuild arrangements in existing suburbs. That should apply only to low-impact proposals, such as single-storey developments with substantial setbacks, and low site coverage that will not overshadow neighbouring developments. People were really upset when they found that next door to them there would be a big new
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video