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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-09-24 Daily Xml
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DEVELOPMENT ACT

The Hon. M. PARNELL (20:18): I move:

That the regulations under the Development Act 1993 concerning schedule 10 (variation), made on 17 July 2008 and laid on the table of this council on 21 July 2008, be disallowed.

The reason I think these regulations should be disallowed is that they do not form part of any well thought out policy of reform to planning arrangements in this state. These regulations are quite clearly payback to the Adelaide City Council for its involvement in the protection of Victoria Park. One would not know that from reading the regulations because the regulations do not make any mention of Victoria Park. What the regulations state is that any development application in the City of Adelaide worth more than $10 million can no longer be dealt with by the Development Assessment Panel of the City of Adelaide and must instead be dealt with by the state-appointed Development Assessment Commission.

I say that it is payback for Victoria Park, but the actual impetus for that decision, apparently, was a tower block in the city that the council Development Assessment Panel knocked back. That was too much for the government to bear, so as a response, and despite the fact of over $1 billion of development being approved by the Adelaide City Council Development Assessment Panel, the government decided that anything worth more than $10 million could not be trusted in the hands of Adelaide City Council and must be referred to the Development Assessment Commission.

This demonstrates to me the absolute hypocrisy with which this government approaches the planning and development regime. We find that, when it suits the government to take something away from a local council, it declares it a major project, it then blames the local council for previous failed attempts and it gets its projects through that way. Yet when other projects come up that clearly deserve major project status and deserve the scrutiny of an environmental impact statement, the government refuses to declare it as such. The government's approach is absolutely random and unpredictable.

One of the flow-on effects of this current regulation is that the Development Assessment Commission does not have the expertise to be dealing with the complex matters for development in the City of Adelaide that the city itself has. What insiders tell me is that the Development Assessment Commission has now gone cap in hand back to the Adelaide City Council saying, 'It is now our job to assess all these developments; we are going to need your help. We are not good at doing it ourselves; we don't have the expertise.' I think the only sensible solution is to see this regulation for what it is, a crude political measure, and for this parliament to disallow it.

It is probably also worth saying that part of this debate, I think, revolves around the government's intention to try to remove the role of elected members in the assessment of development applications. When I was a new member in this place we had to deal with a bill to amend the Development Act which ensured that local councils would set up a development assessment panel that would assess developments. As a parliament, we agreed that these panels would comprise half elected members and half appointed experts.

I believe that was the right balance, because the task of assessing a development is not just a purely technical task, where one ticks boxes and then the approval is granted. There are subjective elements, and one needs to make assessments about how, for example, a development will fit into the character of a local area. You cannot get a monkey with a biro or a sheet of paper with boxes on it and tick them to make that decision. So, I supported the government's reforms to introduce these panels.

However, it seems that, having achieved a good compromise, the government is still unhappy: it is unhappy with the fact that elected members have a role in assessing development. It wants to see only people who it has appointed, only its own safe appointees, as the decision makers—because that is what the Development Assessment Commission is. With no disrespect to any of the individuals involved, they are all appointed by the state government. They are very much a known quantity.

I think it is unreasonable in the extreme for the state government to back away from the position that it reached in 2006—the compromise, if you like, that was reached between regarding development assessment as a purely technical versus a purely political exercise. We have a good compromise, it is reflected in the development assessment panels, and I think we should allow them to get on with their job. I do not think we should have arbitrary restrictions placed on their jurisdiction, such as the restrictions in these regulations. I urge all honourable members to support the motion to disallow them.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. I.K. Hunter.

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