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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-11-27 Daily Xml
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Planning and Design Code

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (14:42): My question is to the Minister for Planning. Does the minister have any concerns with the depth of consultation, time allocated and quality of the engagement process being undertaken by the State Planning Commission in relation to the Planning and Design Code, a 3,000-page PDF and digital mapping interface recently released by the State Planning Commission?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:42): I thank the member for Florey for her question and note her interest in how her community is going to develop. I can update the house to say, for members who live in councils that are in what we call phase 3 of the code, which is every metropolitan council as well as the major provincial centres around regional South Australia, that we are actually in the middle of a five-month consultation process, one that started on 1 October and that will run through to the end of February.

Five months is a long time to be able to get out there, speak to local communities, get their feedback and then incorporate their feedback as part of the code change. As part of this, we have been going out and have already consulted with all the phase 2 councils (to take a slight step back, those phase 2 councils are the regional areas outside large provincial cities). Their consultation period started, again, at the beginning of October and is actually finishing at the end of this month.

At this stage, priority has been given to those councils to work through their issues, but that does not stop people right across South Australia from engaging with the parts of the code that are going to affect their area. So it will be five months and a whole series of engagement platforms through the YourSAy website, through consultation directly with councils, through community meetings that are happening at the moment in regional South Australia that will happen right throughout metropolitan South Australia. Also, the commission members have made themselves available to people who want to speak to them, as well as myself, having conducted now five forums with separate parts of our community to talk through various elements as part of this reform change.

What I would also say is that there are a number of people out there at the moment trying to fearmonger about this process who say that 3,000 pages is a lot of pages. It came down from about 23,000 pages, so I think we are talking about 80 to 85 per cent less in the number of pages. But, of those 3,000 pages, about 2,500 are actually maps and the remaining 500 pages are the bits that have the words in them. So the content itself is much more manageable than what the stack of paper would otherwise look at.

Also, we are working towards something that is online that people are going to be able to grapple with. In fact, even now, if people visit the SA Planning Portal they will be able to look at a map that helps to identify what the potential zoning is for their community under the draft code and, instead of having to flick through a whole heap of documents, they will be able to see this spatially. One of the real key reforms of this planning system is that instead of having 23,000 pages, or even 3,000 pages, we have zero pages and with one click of a button people will be able to look at what zoning and planning policies exist on their site.

We think that that is a fantastic step forward. Laypeople, people like all of us in this room and even planning ministers, will have the ability to click on this and see quite simply what policies apply to people's houses. Can I also say that this process is one that is being undertaken extremely thoroughly, it also embeds a new way of doing things that provides for more consultation. In fact, as part of these changes, we are going to see between a 50 per cent and 100 per cent increase in the amount of time available for consultation on projects of various designation.

Instead of just having to live within 60 metres of where a development is taking place, we are providing the opportunity for everybody to be able to make submissions on various development applications. This is a system that is going to vastly improve how people engage with planning, make it more simple for them to understand and engage with planning and provide better outcomes for our community.

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