Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, to echo the position of Ms Burnet, we will not be supporting this motion to suspend Standing Orders so that these can be debated. Let us be really clear here – this is loose legislation in the first place. This is legislation that is all about riding roughshod over proper process, whether that be a spot approval for a specific development application that is having troubles because of the Government’s own incompetence to deal with some of the blockages and problems that it has encountered. Or whether it is DAPs, which is all about riding roughshod over community access to planning, to the rights of councils to act as the planning authority. It is loose legislation and it is not our job, as a parliament, to loosen our rules so that we can deal with loose legislation that is put up by a bombastic and arrogant minister, who has made a hallmark out of dragging down community, besmirching community, calling them all sorts of names, when all they want to do is have a say in what happens in their place. It is really clear.
There is no case for urgency here. There is absolutely no case for urgency. The only reason the government is even doing this in the first place, when it comes to Stony Rise, is because there was a newspaper ad in the paper a week or so ago, and the Labor Party jumped on board. Is that how we are going to do planning here? We have every developer who wants to get a development up put a full‑page ad in the paper and the government is going to jump to deal with it? I mean, this is just a ridiculous proposition. It is a ridiculous way to do planning in this state.
The bill was drafted – it was published on a Google document. It begs the question as to whether the bill was actually written by the developer in the first place. We did not get an answer from the Premier today as to whether there have been donations from this particular developer to the Liberal Party, and we will not find out for many, many months about that.
This just looks like a Christmas present to a developer. It has nothing to do with proper process and, actually, I do not think it has anything to do with jobs and the economy. It is just all about doing a favour for a developer mate. It is not about the development itself, it is about the process and how we got here. If there are problems with the land use strategy, deal with the land use strategy. Do not just give a spot approval for a single developer. There is no urgency here.
When it comes to DAPs, I will take the point of the Leader of Opposition Business. On 21 July 2023, the Premier announced a process to start going down this DAPs pathway. Now, we do not support it. We do not support the DAPs pathway, and we will have our say when it comes to debating that at some point – whether that is today or in the future – but July 21, 2023. If this is about urgency, as the leader of government business says, if this is about getting on with the business and continuing momentum, I think you should look at your own capacity to deliver your own agenda on time. Eighteen months to get this done. It was tabled on Tuesday and now going to suspend the Standing Orders on Thursday.
Yes, I hear the leader of government business in relation to the Standing Orders. It was two days – it was changed to three. It was changed to three for a very good reason. It was changed to three days so that it would be standard practice for bills to be put in this place, they could not be debated in the same week, so that we, as members, could be afforded the opportunity to talk to stakeholders, to properly get the briefings from government. I am not sure when our member had her briefing on DAPs.
Dr Woodruff – Today.
Mr BAYLEY – Okay, there it is. It is today. That is why we changed the Standing Orders to three days, so that there would be a proper process.
To finish, I want to say, it seems the government itself does not even know how these DAPs are going to work and their interaction with other departments. Ms Badger asked a really great question today of the Parks minister, who waxed lyrical about 50 per cent of the state in our parks and reserves. We all know our parks and reserves are central to our identity; they are fundamental to our economy. He said that there is plenty of work being done in looking after them, but the minister could not even answer the question as to how the parks assessment process, and what has been proposed and promised there, interacts with the DAP process. If the ministers themselves cannot even get their show together, how can we expect to be able to debate this today? We are not even going to get an answer on that question, until this evening, it seems.
We are going to have this whole debate, if we agree to this suspension, we are going to have this whole debate and we do not even have a fundamental answer to a really important question about how these two processes interact with each other. We oppose the suspension. There is no urgency here, and the government should just get its show together.
Time expired.
