Ms BURNET (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to speak about the Land Use Planning and Approvals (Stony Rise Development Approval) Bill before the House. We heard from the minister for a very short time in the second reading speech, which was certainly the shortest I have heard. Whether that means that this is a fait acompli or whether it is something that really is not the purview of a planning minister, but all of a sudden is – that is the question.
A lot of community members and people in local government, elected representatives, general managers and planners care about planning and due process, and unfortunately what we are seeing in the Stony Rise development is a departure from good planning process. No matter what decision has occurred and whether it is the right or wrong decision, there is a planning process which is already in place. The planning process relies on a robust planning scheme, so the local planning scheme, local provisions and the Tasmanian planning system, which has been changed to become faster, cheaper and quicker, but it seems to be taking a long time to land properly, and it relies on the regional land use strategies.
There is the strategic planning element and there is the statutory planning element that planning authorities use to consider developments, as they should, but here we have a complete departure of this process with this bill before us today.
As to this development application, I might talk about the merits or otherwise of it, such as the benefits to the community. Like any development application, this has to be considered against its merits. It may be the best or the worst development application in the world and we have before us something which presumably should be going in what is ostensibly a shopping area. As you go through Devonport, you see the Stony Rise area and what we have is an application which failed. It passed, as we know, at the Devonport Council. It was appealed, it went to a through an appeals process and it ended up at the Tasmanian Planning Commission, ironically enough, to be considered against some of those key elements.
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RECOGNITION OF VISITORS
The SPEAKER – Ms Burnet, I will stop the clock for a moment and seek your indulgence on this matter because they are not here for very long, but up in the gallery are the Youth Speak Out Reconciliation Tasmania people and if I do not recognise them now they will have moved on before there is a gap. We will not interrupt your time. Thank you all for joining us and we hope you have had a great day already. We can restart the clock and I thank you very much for your indulgence.
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Ms BURNET – I had not realised who was behind me.
Planning processes and taking it to the Planning Commission and looking at how they might consider this was very telling, I think, as a case in point. Thank goodness that we have this before us in that sense just to point out how woeful and woefully inadequate in response the state government has been in relation to strategic planning.
The regional land use strategies are a very important component of strategic planning for this state. They guide how things are developed in particular areas. If we take the Southern Tasmanian Regional Land Use Strategy, well out of date now, it did not have the transport hub at Brighton, it did not have the significant pressures of regional development such as housing and that swelling of the urban growth boundary and how that is pushed against. It did not have that transport infrastructure change and consideration, which is integral when you are looking at how people settle. Populations settle as populations increase or decrease in particular areas and the needs of the community have not been properly assessed or addressed when you have land use strategies that are failing miserably, not because of the way they were developed in the first place. It is not a criticism of that. It is the fact that the government has not bothered to get around to changing these in time, so it is a big fail in relation to land use strategies in the south, the north and particularly in this situation, in the north-west.
Everybody expects a planning scheme that is robust and that can deliver. Everybody expects a planning scheme to live up to those expectations that you can rely upon. The planning scheme and the strategy should be there to rely on completely so that the community, developers, government institutions, interested parties and people concerned about the environment have clear strategic guidelines, but it is a big fail because the state government has not updated those in time, nor have they invested enough money in strategic planning. It is fundamental that there is a robust and responsive State Planning Office that is properly funded. It is not bureaucratised, it is properly funded to do the strategic planning that they need to do, but there is this absolute lack of interest from the state government in getting planning right.
It is not the bureaucrats, it is not the people who work in State Planning, because I hear of the frustrations for those intersecting with State Planning because there is not that commitment by the state government to do what it should be doing, not spot rezoning. The state government should be looking at strategic planning, working with planning partners such as the planning authorities whose job it is to look at how to deliver good regional development.
It is a case in point. Here we have Stony Rise. It might be the stony rise that minister Ellis chooses to die on, figuratively.
Mr Ellis – It will be a nice supermarket but I am not that keen on it.
Ms BURNET – Well, you are putting your reputation on the line, minister. We can see what it is going to look like. In some ways I have a lot of sympathy for the way that this developer who may have wanted to build in this area. As Dr Broad has mentioned, it is the perfect place for a shopping centre in many ways, but the regional land use strategy does not provide for it. It is just one of a number of examples, but this particular example is the one that we have before us.
The concern is that we have a process, whether you like it or not, and that was the result. It is a bit like a footy match. If you do not like the result, what do you do? Do you complain about it or do you accept the result of the umpire and hope for changes? It is a bit like bad legislation. If you do not have the right tools in place by which to measure better planning outcomes, then how can you expect them?
The developer was not successful at the Tasmanian Planning Commission and should feel disappointed and let down by the state government for not having those things in place. What does the state government decide to do? The state government decides, ‘Oh well, we didn’t have all the things in place that we should have had. What we will do is we will just introduce a bit of legislation now’. It was not their idea, we hear; it was Labor’s idea to introduce this. It is nothing to crow about. It is a knee‑jerk, dumbed‑down approach to how you do strategic planning and how you have a robust planning system.
No wonder the proponent felt disappointed. Moreover, why is it that the government wants to deliver for one developer and proponent? What does that say to every other developer that has a decision that they are not happy with? What is going to happen then? I wonder what is going to happen then. Is it just going to be a conga line of developers going cap in hand to the minister, to the opposition, to Dr Broad? He might say, ‘Oh yeah, it would be a good idea. Why don’t we have a development here? Let’s not worry about process’. This is what is at stake here: it is process; it is doing things properly. We have not seen one iota or one skerrick of the government wanting to do their job properly.
We have talked about the land use strategies and, without labouring the point – I have the floor so I might as well – I will point out the Local Government Association of Tasmania (LGAT) submission on the development assessment panel. The regional planning strategies are outdated. The three regional land use strategies are nearly 15 years old and critical to guiding local development and increasing certainty for proponents. Both local government and the Planning Institute of Australia have asked for these to be updated for years.
I was at a Local Government Association conference and the newly appointed national chair of the Planning Institute of Australia, Emma Riley, stated that she was absolutely frustrated with the approach that the state government is taking in funding and the land use strategies and so forth. She was one of the authors of the Regional Land Use Strategy in the south, but it is 15 years out of date. This is the concern.
Stony Rise is a case study in Devonport. Recently, the impact of Tasmania’s broken planning foundations attacked repeated media attention and the ire of industry. It has now attracted a full-page ad in three newspapers across Tasmania, just to make their point in relation to how frustrated they are. They have a government who is responding by saying, ‘Yep, we will push this through. No need to worry about it. We will actually do it.’ The government is not worrying about the maturity of tabling legislation and giving it the prerequisite three days to mature. ‘No, we will push it through straight away. We will not even really care for public comment in relation to this. There is no time for public comment for a supermarket application’. It is quite extraordinary – absolutely extraordinary.
We have this embarrassing situation where Stony Rise Devonport was rejected by the TPC in part on the basis of the Cradle Coast Regional Land Use strategy, which was out of date. It is not the first time that the outdated regional land use strategies have contributed to this kind of situation, and it can be expected it will not be the last.
I imagine that we will get just a trickle, or maybe more development proponents coming through and saying ‘I didn’t like that decision. Who can I tap on the shoulder? Is it going to be the minister for planning? Minister for planning, how about this?’ We will probably hear, later in the day, more about that kind of tawdry and very lacklustre, almost corrupt process in how business is done in Tasmania. That is the concern.
Back to my point about who is going to be impacted. It is going to be a situation where you have winners and losers, because somebody obviously appealed this. Dr Broad said it was a multinational, but I think –
Dr Broad – No, we did not say multinational.
Ms BURNET – Sorry. What did you say?
Dr Broad – The owner of the current supermarket and the Goodstone Group.
Ms BURNET – Are multinationals?
Dr Broad – No.
Ms BURNET – Goodstone?
Dr Broad – Goodstone Group own the bottle shops; they are not multinational. They are a large business.
Ms BURNET – Okay, a local developer? It is even worse, in effect, isn’t it? A local developer is pitched against a local developer –
Mr Winter – I am not sure if you know; you do not like the Goodstone Group. The Greens do not like that one.
Mr Ellis – It sounds very much like changing your argument to suit yourself.
Ms BURNET – No, I think it is a case in point, minister, because the situation is that it is not acceptable. If it is a little guy in the corner, it might be a mum‑and‑dad developer or investor who is impacted by this flip-flopping approach that this government has, paying no heed, to proper process. It is quite disappointing in so many ways.
Let us go through the background of this. There was an application to build the Stony Rise village by the applicant, a shopping centre near Devonport. There was a claim that it would create 1200 jobs and add $25 million of value to houses in the area. There was the rezoning application, not backed by the Tasmanian Planning Commission. Planning takes a long time, much longer than the government would have us want to consider applications before us in this sort of situation – making decisions on what, frankly, should be planning authority decision‑making. It was reassessed, then there was the advertisement in the paper. We have kind of had a departure from how planning might occur and decisions might occur.
We have this legislation before us, which has really been something that is probably not extraordinary in the sense of the way the Liberals might want to bypass planning laws. However, I am not sure if there is another example of when this has occurred before – that you have this parliament making a spot zoning decision.
Mr Ellis – This parliament, and Parliament Square ‑ that building over there.
Ms BURNET – Okay, that is good to know. I would like to see that. If you can send me a copy of the information I would love to read it, but this should not be something that ‑ the Parliament Square building is something slightly different to a shopping centre.
Mr Ellis – Because it is for politicians rather than everyday people?
Ms BURNET – It is not new for the Liberals to come up with this kind of approach, Speaker, as you have probably seen before. It is a reckless idea which sets a dangerous pattern of behaviour. You wonder which developer is going to be lining up for special government approval to subvert the planning process? Is it going be a cable car on kunanyi/Mount Wellington?
In summary, what we see is a government that cannot be trusted in delivering the regional land use strategies and that robust framework for planning decisions to be made. If we have this kind of departure for a shopping centre, for whatever it might be, it really corrupts the process. It is a process that is of great concern. It is more of this mish-mash approach to planning. Planning should not be a mish-mash approach. Unfortunately, what we see with this minister, he wants to interfere, he wants to intervene, he wants to play God when it comes to planning. We have a situation where it is not clear and it is not good enough for proponents, people who might oppose it, other owners.
I think it was the Property Council who came out against this kind of approach – the Property Council, which is renowned for looking after developers. Even the Property Council does not ‑ I think the Property Council was standing behind you at a press conference the other day on another matter, Mr Ellis.
Mr Ellis – Gaps.
Ms BURNET – The Property Council does not like this. They can see that it is not a good way of approaching planning. This is a horrendous way of approaching planning. The Greens will not be supporting this.
