DEVELOPMENT (DEVELOPMENT PLAN AMENDMENTS) AMENDMENT BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. M. PARNELL (15:48): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Development Act 1993. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. M. PARNELL (15:48): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This bill is one of a number of bills that I have introduced in the past, and will introduce in the future, that have come out of a considerable body of work undertaken by an organisation known as Community Alliance. This group is a couple of years old now and it is an umbrella body that represents a large number (over 30) of different residents and ratepayers' associations from around South Australia.

What all of these groups have in common is that, at some stage or other, they have all had to deal with the planning system and they have all found that system to be inadequate. Members will recall that in the past I have introduced bills to clean up the interim operation provisions of the Development Act, and this council, in its wisdom, has seen fit to support that bill. It now languishes in the lower house. I also put forward a second bill to amend the Development Act which, again, passed this house but is now languishing in the lower house.

What I have today with this bill is yet another attempt to fix problems that have been identified by community groups as difficulties with the Development Act that are in urgent need of reform. This particular bill does two main things: first of all, it reforms the system around the Development Policy Advisory Committee; secondly, it deals with the subject of parliamentary scrutiny of planning schemes under the Development Act.

I will deal with the first issue. The first problem that was identified by the community alliance and its member groups was that in the Development Act there is no trigger for the Development Policy Advisory Committee to be brought in to consider the effect of planning changes and, in particular, rezoning changes. Currently, the only trigger is that if the minister wants to get advice the minister can ask for that advice. That, I submit, is an inadequate trigger for what is effectively the main vehicle for public input—that is, submissions to and appearances before the Development Policy Advisory Committee.

What this legislation does is basically add to the ministerial discretion already in the bill. It adds further triggers, the first of which is that if a local council requests the Development Policy Advisory Committee to consider a development plan amendment that request should be sufficient for the minister to trigger that process. Secondly, the Development Policy Advisory Committee should be able to resolve, of its own initiative, to look at a controversial rezoning regardless of whether the minister has called for that advice. I think that is a sensible reform because there are situations where, clearly, rezonings have been controversial, the minister has not sought advice and therefore the Development Policy Advisory Committee has not met.

The second reform relates to when the Development Policy Advisory Committee does seek submissions from the public and the public, in good faith, make their submissions but there is no mechanism for them to find out how their submissions were treated—whether they were taken seriously, whether they were ignored—and how their comments fitted into the overall scheme of comments made by other members of the community.

The solution to this inadequacy is to require the Development Policy Advisory Committee to respond to all those who make submissions with a copy of its advice to the minister, and that advice would show how submissions were accepted or rejected and the reasons why. In order to bring that about, there is a change required in the terminology of the act so that the task of the Development Policy Advisory Committee becomes one of preparing a report and not just giving advice to the minister.

However, I think the point has been well made by a number of community groups—that it is disrespectful in the extreme for people to spend hours (collectively, in fact, hundreds and sometimes even thousands of hours) preparing detailed submissions on what they like or do not like or suggested reforms to planning schemes only to find that work going into a black hole and for them to not find out how their submissions were treated.

We have had some minor improvements over the years, and certainly now the Development Policy Advisory Committee finally releases its advice to the minister, but it only does so, in some cases, many months after the final decision has been made, well after the horse has bolted. If we can change that system so that the Development Policy Advisory Committee prepares a report and is obliged to provide that report to all those who made submissions, that goes partway towards treating the public more respectfully.

However, you do need to take one further step, and that is to make sure that the minister does not make a final decision on a development plan amendment—on a rezoning, for example—before that report has been released. It makes no sense for the current situation to apply, where the advice is only made public long after the final decision has been made.

Those three elements make up the reform package in this bill. The Development Policy Advisory Committee will have increased triggers to enable it to investigate contentious rezoning exercises, it will be required to provide a more detailed report than it currently does, it will be required to provide that report to those who made submissions, and the minister will not be able to make a final decision until after the publication of the report.

Those reforms alone would not actually deliver what is required if we were to have a genuine system of oversight in the planning system because the current system of parliamentary scrutiny of planning schemes is probably best described as a joke. The proof of that assertion is the fact that, through the entirety of its existence, the parliamentary scrutiny trigger has never been used to reject rezoning.

Think of how many rezoning exercises there would have been since 1994: they would number in the hundreds; I have not taken the trouble to count them, but it may even be more. All those planning schemes—many of them highly controversial, many of them not having majority support in parliament—yet there has never been one that has been knocked off in parliament, notwithstanding the provision of the Development Act that is euphemistically described as 'parliamentary scrutiny'.

There are a couple of reasons that is the case; the first, as many members know, is that parliamentary scrutiny does not take place in relation to planning changes until after the minister has made a final decision, so after the horse has bolted. The minister has made a final decision, it is in the Government Gazette, and the changes to the planning scheme are operative, then, and only then, does the parliament get to have a look at it.

In fact—and I have mentioned this on a number of occasions in this place—even if the parliament were to reject a rezoning, it would not be retrospective, in which case the work that planning change had to do would have been done by the time parliament got to it. The reality is that a system, described as 'parliamentary scrutiny', where the parliament is effectively nobbled by not getting to scrutinise the changes to the planning scheme until after they have come into operation, is a joke of a system.

There is another element of the parliamentary scrutiny process that is the subject of a separate bill (which I will get to shortly) which also means that the parliament has never taken its role seriously—that is, the fact that the particular standing committee of the parliament that has responsibility for planning schemes, the Environment, Resources and Development Committee of parliament, is at present controlled by the government of the day. That means that over its 20-year history it has never made a decision adverse to the interests of the government of the day. The solution to that (as I will get to shortly on the other bill) is to make that committee a Legislative Council committee.

In terms of the bill before us now, I think it goes a long way towards improving the scheme for planning changes in this state. It enables the Development Policy Advisory Committee to engage more respectfully with the community and it ensures that parliamentary scrutiny of changes to planning schemes occurs before the change comes into operation and not after.

Just to make the mechanism very clear, the bill provides that the minister must not approve a change to a planning scheme until after the parliamentary scrutiny period has expired. If the Environment, Resources and Development Committee disagrees with a planning change and it goes before both houses of parliament, then that should stop the clock.

Again, the minister should not be able to gazette the operation of a change until the parliament has well and truly finished its deliberations. This need not add a great deal of time to the process because, in the vast majority of cases, these changes go through very smoothly. However, what it really does is it actually gives truth to the heading of that section of the Development Act entitled 'parliamentary scrutiny' because at present, as I say, parliamentary scrutiny is a joke. With those comments, I commend the bill to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. G.A. Kandelaars.