HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Subject Index
Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-03-20 Daily Xml
Contents
Pdf Xml

MOUNT BARKER DEVELOPMENT

The Hon. M. PARNELL (16:16): I move:

That this council—

1. Notes—

(a) the report of the Ombudsman entitled Investigation into the Growth Investigation Areas Report Procurement laid on the table of this council on 5 March 2013;

(b) the findings of the report in relation to conflict of interest, lack of probity, the integrity of the procurement process and other maladministration;

(c) the additional reported comments of the Ombudsman to the media that he expected and hoped that the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption would investigate matters raised in his report; and

(d) that the main operative provisions of the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2012 are yet to be proclaimed.

2. Calls on the government to proclaim the commencement of the remainder of the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2012 as soon as possible.

3. On the commencement of the act, refers the Ombudsman's report to the Office for Public Integrity pursuant to section 17 of the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2012.

4. Calls on the government to immediately release the Growth Investigation Areas Report as recommended by the Ombudsman.

When the Ombudsman's report was handed down and tabled in parliament two weeks ago, the first question I was asked by a journalist was, 'You must feel vindicated,' because, as all members know, I have been talking about this issue in parliamentary motions and in bills and in questions for the last four years or longer.

I have raised the issue of the Mount Barker rezoning and the failure of process at public meetings, I have raised it at meetings of the Development Policy Advisory Committee, I have raised it in the media. Over many years, I have tried to follow the paper trail, and I have been stymied at every turn by the government and the property developers. I have been dragged before the District Court to defend the right of members of the public to access documents held by the planning department.

But now we have this Ombudsman's report. In his 67-page report, the Ombudsman has joined the dots, and he has concluded what I have known for years and what the residents of Mount Barker have known for years, and that is that the planning system has failed. The planning system, which is supposed to focus on the wellbeing and the best interests of all South Australians, has been demeaned, degraded and devalued by the inability of the government to avoid or even manage the most obvious and clear-cut case of conflict of interest.

I will not deny that I do feel vindicated by this report. However, my overwhelming emotions are of frustration and despair that the government clearly intends to tough it out and has no intention of addressing the end results of its flawed planning processes, and that is the flawed planning outcomes that have delivered us the travesty of the Mount Barker urban sprawl.

It is clear to me that the government values the profits of its developer mates ahead of the public interest and, for that, the people of Mount Barker will most certainly maintain their rage—and my prediction is that they will not be alone. As I will outline later, the conflict of interest that was identified at Mount Barker is certain to have been repeated elsewhere in South Australia.

If you look at paragraph 249 of the Ombudsman's report, you can find a list of areas where the consulting firm Connor Holmes has worked prior to its appointment by the government to write the GIA report, and that list of locations is as follows: Buckland Park, Roseworthy, Gawler East, Cheetham salt works, Mount Barker, Victor Harbor, Goolwa North, Playford North, Blakeview, Penfield, Mawson Lakes, Greater Edinburgh Parks, Northfield, Walkley Heights, Seaford, Munno Parra. These are the areas we have to look at next. They are areas that were included in the Growth Investigation Areas, which I will henceforth refer to as the GIA report. So, the conflict of interest findings that the Ombudsman made in relation to Mount Barker are just as likely to be relevant to those areas as well.

The motion invites members to note the Ombudsman's report. As members know, on 5 March 2013 the Ombudsman, Richard Bingham, tabled in parliament his report on the departmental procurement processes associated with the Growth Investigation Areas Report. The issue was referred to the Ombudsman by the Legislative Council on 30 May 2012. In his media release accompanying the report, the Ombudsman said:

The GIA report was a central contributor to the development of the government's 30 Year Plan for Greater Adelaide, and was prepared on behalf of the planning department by consultants Connor Holmes Pty Ltd. However, the Ombudsman investigation focused on the relevant departmental procurement processes rather than on Connor Holmes' role.

It is important to note that the Ombudsman did not and could not investigate or make any determination on whether or not the government had made good decisions in approving the 30-year plan or even whether Connor Holmes had done a good job, either on behalf of its property developer clients or on behalf of the government. That was not the Ombudsman's role and he made no comment on the merits or otherwise of rezoning land at Mount Barker or anywhere else.

The Ombudsman is not a town planner, as I understand his qualifications. He purely looked at the process, so whether or not the failure of process that was identified by the Ombudsman supports the proposition that the outcome of the planning process is also flawed ultimately will be a judgement for others, including the Legislative Council.

What did the Ombudsman say in his report? He commences his observations in the executive summary as follows:

The legislated planning system in this state governs where and how the community lives. It can determine the quality of our physical, social, visual and economic environment, and impact on the wellbeing of our daily life. The community entrusts the government to develop and administer the state's planning system in the public interest.

Where the government chooses to engage consultants to assist in achieving its planning objectives, the community is entitled to expect that rigorous and accountable procurement processes will be followed—including ensuring consultant probity and identifying and dealing with conflicts of interest. Where government fails to do this, community confidence is lost.

That is why in his opinion piece in InDaily on 6 March, David Washington, who I should note acknowledges at the foot of his piece that he was planning minister John Rau's media adviser from January 2011 to July 2012, says:

The debacle of the Mount Barker urban expansion is the reason why we cannot have a calm and sensible debate about development in South Australia.

The smell emanating from the government's decision to massively expand Mount Barker's urban boundary overpowers any of the sweeter offerings it has been attempting to make in the area of planning and development.

Protecting McLaren Vale and the Barossa from urban sprawl? Fine—but what about Mount Barker? Improving design input into city buildings? Yeah, yeah—but what about Mount Barker?

Until the Mount Barker issue is dealt with openly—once and for all—the community is quite right to question all motives and processes involved in South Australia's planning and development system.

Back to the Ombudsman's report. The Ombudsman goes to some lengths to identify what went wrong with the procurement process for the GIA consultancy. How was it that something that was so blindingly obvious to the rest of the community was invisible to the government? The Ombudsman identifies three key factors as contributing to compromising the integrity of the GIA procurement process. These were: first, political imperatives and the need for speedy completion of the GIA project; secondly, staffing and agency changes; and, thirdly, a failure to appreciate the significance of conflict of interest in procurement.

As for that last point, it is hard to comprehend how the government could not have been aware of the problem. For example, on 15 September 2008, PIRSA's procurement adviser unit sent an email to the Crown Solicitor's Office seeking advice on conflict of interest in relation to the related 30-year plan tender, a process also involving Connor Holmes and run in parallel with the GIA project. The Ombudsman quotes directly from the response from the Crown Solicitor dated 29 September 2008:

In any Government procurement process the basic starting point should be that, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary, a conflict of interest situation whether actual or perceived, should not be permitted...in the context of Government procurement processes the generally accepted principle is that processes must be free, and be seen to be free, of conflict and bias in decision-making. This is essential for maintaining public confidence in the integrity of these processes. Public perception as to the operation of such processes is of the utmost importance.

That is the advice of the Crown Solicitor's Office. It is incomprehensible that the government did not understand what that meant. I would like, however, to touch briefly on the other two factors identified by the Ombudsman: the factor of 'political imperatives and the need for speedy completion of the GIA project'.

Whether or not any of these political imperatives (as the Ombudsman calls them) were corrupt with a capital 'C' or even with a small 'c', or whether some other form of maladministration is involved, will ultimately be a question for the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). No doubt, the ICAC commissioner will want to look at the political donation history of the developers. I have raised it before in this place, that is, the Walker Corporation is a big donor to the ALP and has also been the beneficiary of discretionary ministerial decisions, including the approval of the Buckland Park development and this rezoning at Mount Barker.

I note that political imperatives have long been a hallmark of this government, whether it be the planning abomination that is the Buckland Park development, or even the desperate desire for cranes on the skyline that drove the government to allow development approvals to be granted two weeks before the public consultation process had even finished, as we saw with the Capital City Development Plan Amendment. So is it any wonder that in many parts of the community the government's policy is regarded as 'development at any cost'?

The final factor raised by the Ombudsman was the issue of staffing and agency changes. I will quote two paragraphs from the Ombudsman's report. Paragraph 192 reads:

Turning to government planning, it appears that consultants are often relied upon in planning matters. My investigation took evidence from the president of the Planning Institute of Australia, SA Division (PIA) during the time of the GIA project procurement. It is relevant to note that the president disclosed at the outset to my investigation, that the consulting company for which she works provided a capability statement during the GIA project procurement process.

Paragraph 193 reads:

The president quoted in her evidence that PIA members do 'a lot of the work that government staff did in the old days'. Further, in her view, resource shortage within government planning is driving a 'closer than usual relationship between consultants and government'.

This is from a government that was going to end privatisation, this move towards a closer relationship with private consultants. This outsourcing, in fact, is actually one of the more insidious forms of privatisation. What the government has done is replaced the frank and fearless advice of public servants with the conflicted and self-serving advice of private consultants. No wonder the public is angry.

Land-use planning is a public interest exercise and it should be conducted by people whose only interest is the public interest. I note from the Deputy Premier's statement to parliament yesterday that he said the following:

The planning department has significantly increased its capacity to deliver in-depth technical advice since 2008. This has significantly reduced the need to engage consultants and hence the risk of future conflict of interest issues of the nature identified by the Ombudsman.

What the Deputy Premier is acknowledging is that, over a period of years, they have got this terribly wrong, but rather than take comfort from the fact that the Deputy Premier—the planning minister—is going to make sure that there is less outsourced work, the problem is that the damage has been done. The damage was the GIA report. The damage was the 30-year plan.

This approach of the government is the consequence of cuts to essential public services. For the benefit of opposition members of this chamber, take note of what happens when the Public Service is cut in relation to the provision of important public services like planning. This is where those sorts of policies lead. Less public servants is more privatisation, more outsourcing and more conflict of interest.

So, what did the government know about the conflict of interest in relation to Connor Holmes and the Mount Barker project? They certainly knew there was a conflict, but they did nothing about it. To quote from paragraph 286 of the Ombudsman's report:

It is clear from the documentation that before and during the GIA procurement process, relevant Planning SA officers knew of Connor Holmes representation of the Mount Barker consortium and their advocacy for expansion and development in the area to the minister. However, it was not identified that Connor Holmes were conflicted in relation to GIA project work in the area. In my view this failure infected the integrity of the procurement.

It is clear that the department knew that the people they had entrusted with the job of preparing the GIA report were the same people who were advocating on behalf of the private property developers, who in fact owned or had stakes in the land that was being considered for rezoning.

The outcome of this all was—and it will come as no surprise to members—that the final product produced by Connor Holmes in the GIA report was very close to the position they had taken when lobbying on behalf of their property developer consortium clients. In fact, I do not do it justice: it is far worse than that. What they gave the government as a paid consultant was identical to what they gave the government as a lobbyist for the developers! I quote from paragraph 329 of the Ombudsman's report:

It appears that Connor Holmes preliminary report on Mount Barker was completed by 23 December 2008. I note that the chief planning officer [that is, of the department] reported that he had 'a number of misgivings'. One, for example, was that the proposed urban boundary was 'the same as that put to the minister earlier in the year by the consortium of developers'.

So, the bottom line is that when it came time for Connor Holmes to report to the government with the GIA, what Connor Holmes said was, 'Here's one we prepared earlier.' The proposed urban boundary was exactly the same. The same boundary they used to lobby the minister on behalf of private consultants was what they presented to the minister as a result of their consultancy report.

The problem, of course, is that this is not some 1970s cooking show; this is the long-term planning of our state. It is not good enough for Connor Holmes to have been allowed to get away with saying, 'Here's one we prepared earlier,' and to present the government, as a consultant, with exactly the same urban boundary as they had been lobbying for on behalf of their private clients.

Of course you could say that this was simply a happy convergence of interests that was at work here. You might say that it was a happy coincidence that what was good for the consortium of property developers was also good for the people of South Australia. I do not believe that; I do not believe it for one minute. The people of Mount Barker do not believe that. We know that the system is rotten and that the unresolved conflict of interest is at the heart of the stench.

I refer now to the referral of these matters to the Independent Commission Against Corruption. In his statement accompanying the release of his report—a media statement—the Ombudsman said:

I'd be expecting, and I'd be hoping, that the ICAC will be casting a very serious eye at the sorts of things we found in this report.

Since then we have the minister's statement from yesterday, and I will just refer to it briefly. Planning minister and Deputy Premier, John Rau, in his statement says:

The Ombudsman has indicated to me that he has written to the Office for Public Integrity establishment team and provided a copy of his report, with a view to their consideration of what might be done about his expressed concerns regarding apparent maladministration. That having been done, there is no need for me to repeat the exercise.

In other words, the matter is already in the hands of the office of public integrity. What an absolute cop-out is that from the Minister for Planning!

He is saying that the Ombudsman has already sent it off—I should say not to the office of public integrity but to the Office for Public Integrity Establishment Team because, as the motion before the council indicates, we have not yet had the formal establishment of the office of public integrity. We do not yet have the establishment of the ICAC.

That is not expected until, I am led to believe, September of this year. Really, that is leaving things too late. We had the announcement of the appointment before Christmas; why on earth do we need to wait until September for this office to be established? But the minister does not get off the hook by saying that the Ombudsman himself has sent it to the Office for Public Integrity Establishment Team and therefore he does not need to.

The other thing that is worth pointing out is that the Mount Barker council has just this week unanimously resolved to refer this same matter to the ICAC, and I would like to acknowledge the work of Mount Barker councillor Ian Grosser, a tireless advocate for his community. It was he who steered that motion through council this week. We have already had two agencies referring it to the ICAC. I will be a third; I will refer it myself. I have had a look at the list of people who can refer—members of parliament can—and I want this chamber to be the fourth.

In passing this resolution, when it comes to a vote—on the next Wednesday of sitting is my expectation, but I will give notice—I expect this chamber will be the fourth body to refer this matter to the ICAC. The statement made by the Deputy Premier yesterday contained a number of interesting observations. One of the things that the Deputy Premier said was:

The selection of Mount Barker as a growth area, was evidence based and was not criticised by the Ombudsman.

Of course it was not criticised by the Ombudsman because the Ombudsman is not a town planner. It was not in his brief; it was not part of his job. In fact, the Ombudsman would have been out of order in commenting on the merits of the planning decisions that were made. This is a classic straw man argument.

So let us look at the actual substantive response of the planning minister to the Ombudsman's report and I have to say, it is pathetic. Four things: firstly, he is going to get his department to have a look at it. Of course he is going to get his department to have a look at it but that does not fill anyone with any confidence, especially not the people of Mount Barker, given that it was his department that was responsible for the failings identified in the Ombudsman's report.

Secondly, he is going to get the Procurement Board to have a look at it. Yes, that is fine, but that does not fix the problem either. Thirdly, he is going to get Mr Brian Hayes QC and his expert panel on planning reform to have a look at it. They are reporting at the end of 2014; that is when they are going to have a look at it. Fourthly, he is going to have a look at it himself, if he is still the minister when the 30-year plan comes up for review in February 2015. This is the decisive and firm response of the government. They are going to have a bit of a look at it and, if they can postpone it for several years, all the better.

What the Mount Barker residents wanted to hear was that the minister would take this more seriously and that he would put a freeze on further subdivision and a freeze on building new housing estates for those subdivisions that have already been approved. The minister says that is too hard. He says it is absurd to suggest that property developers be denied their profits that have resulted from what is now clearly a flawed and conflicted planning process. He is trying to do a Pontius Pilate, and it is not even Easter yet; he is trying to wash his hands of the outcome. Yesterday in his statement the minister said:

In areas already rezoned, legal processes have existed to review or overturn any rezoning decision. This has not occurred in this case.

Who does he think he is fooling? There is no right of appeal against a rezoning under the Development Act. There is no right of appeal, so what opportunity would people have had to use these legal processes that have existed? Sure, you have always got the general right to apply to the court on judicial review if you have evidence that proper processes have not been followed but, again, until the Ombudsman's report came out two weeks ago, most people would not have had the evidence.

As I have said, I have been fighting the government and the developers in court to try to get the evidence. It was those documents that I eventually recovered out of the department, given reluctantly, after the developers lost the court case in the District Court, that formed the basis of the Ombudsman's finding. I have spent years of battling to try to get to the bottom of this and have been stymied at every turn by the government and by the developers.

There is no clear legal process to review or overturn the zoning decision: there is only judicial review. Such cases are notoriously difficult to bring. You just have to look at the instance where the Cheltenham Park residents gave it a go—they did not get very far. In fact, my understanding is there has only been one successful challenge to a ministerial zoning decision like this in 30 years. It is not something about which the minister can simply say, 'There was a process and no-one has used it.' Again, it is another straw man argument.

The question then arises: is the minister's reluctance to take action to remedy the problem at Mount Barker based on a lack of legal powers or is it based on a lack of political will? The answer is that it is certainly the latter because he does have the power and it is not too late. I was in Mount Barker last week. There are still cattle grazing in these fields. There has not been a single house built in these rezoned areas. Most of the subdivisions have not even been lodged yet, let alone approved. It is not too late to revisit these decisions.

The minister well knows that, until works have started, it is not too late for him to call this project in and take personal responsibility for it, and his power to do that lies in section 46 of the Development Act. This is a section that I have talked about a lot in this place, mostly because it has been abused, but here is a chance to put it to good use.

It is the major developments or projects division of the Development Act. Basically, what it says is that, if the minister is of the opinion that a declaration is needed for the proper assessment of developments because of their major environmental, social or economic importance, he can call it in. He can call that in and he can take the decision-making away from the council and away from the Development Assessment Commission. He can call that power in to himself—to the Governor, technically, but that effectively means the government. The only restriction he faces in this case is where it says:

(2) A declaration under this section does not extend to—

(a) a development lawfully commenced by substantial work on the site of the development before publication of the notice in the Gazette.

There has been no substantial work on the site of the development. There are still cows there; there are not houses there. The minister has the power to call this development in and effectively put a halt to all the future subdivisions that could be lodged and even the existing subdivisions that have been lodged.

I acknowledge that there is no precedent for the minister taking such action. It has not been done before in a sort of remedial way as I am proposing here, but it is certainly possible. We know, because of the privative clause in section 48E, there is no challenge to any decision the minister makes under a major project declaration—no challenge. I encourage members to have a look at section 48E.

If the minister wants to buy time, if the minister wants to see how much of the omelette he can unscramble, then that is what he needs to do. He would declare all residential subdivisions within the rezoned area to be a major project. That has the additional benefits of the lack of appeal rights by developers and there is also no right to compensation. The minister has a virtually unfettered discretion to fix up this mess.

I am suggesting this as a holding measure. If the minister ultimately decides not to take permanent action, he can undo the declaration. He can take it out of the Government Gazette just as easily as he can put it in.

This is a desperate situation and I know what I am proposing is a desperate measure. As I say, I have been on the record many times about the abuse of major project status. I have been on the record saying how section 48E—the privative clause—needs to be repealed. It has not been, so let the minister now use it and use it for good.

The minister in his statement yesterday selectively quoted paragraphs from the Ombudsman's finding, but he has had to search very hard to find any conclusions that are positive or even neutral in relation to the government's behaviour. For example, he quotes paragraph 141 of the Ombudsman's report, where the Ombudsman states:

I accept that Planning SA staff acted in good faith; that there was no intent to undermine the procurement process in seeking the capability statements; and that there was no intent to deceive the [Accredited Purchasing Unit].

That does not get us very far. Saying that the public servants involved did not intend to do the wrong thing, that they did not intend to be deceitful is not the point. They can tell that to the ICAC. They can have that discussion then. The problem is that the conflict of interest was known and it was real and it resulted in a flawed process that led to flawed outcomes, and the most flawed of all those outcomes was the unnecessary urban sprawl of Mount Barker.

The motion before us calls for the government to release the GIA. I note that as well as the Ombudsman releasing his own report on 5 March, he released another document entitled the Freedom of Information Act 1991 and the GIA report. That supplementary report, if you like, sets out the determinations of the government and the Ombudsman in relation to four freedom of information applications that were lodged by me. One of those applications was for the GIA report. The Ombudsman said:

By determination dated 7 July 2010, the Ombudsman found that the report was exempt from disclosure (under the Cabinet document exemption in the FOI Act). But the Ombudsman suggested that whilst the GIA report was exempt from disclosure, in light of the objects of the FOI Act, there may be good reason why it should nonetheless be released. The GIA report has not been released.

Since the Ombudsman's report came out, there were others in the community who joined the chorus for the government to release the GIA report, people who joined the dots and worked out the importance of those documents. I mentioned before journalist David Washington from InDaily who said on 6 March, referring to the planning minister:

If he wants to clear this up once and for all—and why wouldn't he?—he needs to immediately release the GIA report and then commission a full, public review of the Mt Barker DPA process.

What we saw yesterday is that, some 2½ years after the Ombudsman said that it would be a good idea to release the report, the government has finally done it. It was on the eve of this motion being presented to the Legislative Council. The government finally decided that it could no longer hide and that the veil of secrecy needed to be at least partially lifted.

The documents, including the GIA report and related planning documents, were tabled in both houses of parliament yesterday. They were tabled in hard copy format, as they are, but I note that they have now been uploaded to the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure website and also the parliamentary website on the House of Assembly side. For the benefit of Hansard, I will give the URL for the departmental location of these documents: http://www.dpti.sa.gov.au/planning/home/technical_reports_greater_adelaide_planning_strategy.

In conclusion, as I said earlier, the Mount Barker conflict of interest findings are just the tip of the iceberg. I read out earlier a list of all the other areas where this conflict of interest is likely to have occurred, areas where Connor Holmes is on the record as having done planning work, some of which may be for local councils but much of which would be for private clients, and those areas overlap very strongly with the Growth Investigation Areas report locations as well.

But there are other areas of conflict of interest that have emerged, even in the last few days, that show that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Someone recently sent me the minutes of the meeting of the Strategic Planning and Development Policy Committee of The Rural City of Murray Bridge, dated 25 February 2013. I should say that they are not the sort of minutes that members necessarily pour over in great detail, but they were sent to me. No doubt the person thought I would have an interest in it. It shows the people who were present at the meeting, the staff who were in attendance, and does touch on the issue of conflict of interest.

Who was present at the meeting? First of all, Stuart Moseley, presiding member. Who were the staff in attendance? First listed, Mr Darren Starr, the acting manager of planning. When you get down to the conflict of interest section it states that:

The Presiding Member advised that he and the Acting Manager Planning, Darren Starr, work for the same organisation Connor Holmes (A Fyfe Company) but that he did not consider any conflict [of interest] arises given that both roles are advisory to Council.

Let us go back to first principles here. This is a council committee. It is called the Strategic Planning and Development Policy Committee. Why does the council have a committee? Because it has to, as stated in the Development Act, section 101A—Councils to establish strategic planning and development policy committees. So, who has The Rural City of Murray Bridge got on theirs? It is chaired by a principal of Connor Holmes and in terms of the chief staff representative, the acting manager of planning, he also works for Connor Holmes.

They say there is no conflict of interest because it is only advisory. Well, goodness gracious. The GIA report that was the subject of the Ombudsman's inquiry, could be argued to be just an advisory report and the government will argue that. It will say, 'We take lots of things into account when making rezoning decisions and the GIA report was only one of them.' I mean, have they learnt nothing? Have we learnt absolutely nothing?

Conflict of interest: it is one thing to declare that you have a conflict, but the Ombudsman agreed with me that declaring it does not make it go away. You actually have to prevent it in the first place, and if it cannot be prevented then you have to manage it, and neither of those things happened in the case of the GIA report. I do feel for the good people of Murray Bridge. It looks like they are facing, I think, a similar type of inquiry to the Ombudsman's inquiry into the GIA report. Conflict of interest: it is at every level of government.

I want to finish with an email I received yesterday from a constituent, someone called Mick, who I have never met. He wrote to me out of the blue. He got my email address off the website. Mick says:

...good to see somebody finally doing something in the corruption riddled state.

Mr Parnell, is it at all possible that you could recommend that the ICAC mob look into the Gawler East development as well?

That was the question. I wrote back saying, yes—as I have just told the council, Mount Barker is just the tip of the iceberg. The same issues of conflict of interest arise in Gawler East, Roseworthy, the South and elsewhere. I wrote back to Mick and I told him that and he sent me another email today:

Thanks Mark but it doesn't matter mate. I have closed my business and my wife is wrapping hers up as we speak. We are selling the home we love in Evanston Park as we are threatened with a dual lane road running past our gate carrying 30,000 cars a day and we are leaving this state completely. I moved to South Australia 12 years ago with high hopes and have built a great life but after being ridden roughshod over by state government, councils and the like it seems that regular citizens are not important in this state and neither are our businesses. So we'll take them to where we are appreciated and where we are treated with a bit of respect. Thanks for your time, I'll see you in Tasmania.

I know the government will try to say that the action it is taking to fast-track projects, to get cranes on the skyline, is a pro-business agenda and is good for our state but, clearly, ordinary people do not see it like that. They see themselves being ignored. They see themselves being ridden roughshod over. They see the insincerity of government consultation processes where they put in submissions only to find that the decisions were made two weeks before the process was even finished. That is the impression people are starting to have, if they do not have it already, in relation to planning in South Australia.

This is an important motion. I will send members a note calling it to a vote as quickly as we can but, for now, I would urge all honourable members to read the Ombudsman's report and to have a think about what it means for the integrity of our planning system. I urge all members to support this motion.

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

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT