Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, we changed the Standing Orders for a reason, because of the abuses that the Liberals are using today. It is an utter abuse when you have every single mayor in Tasmania outraged and doing media on the DAPs legislation.
Our member for Clark, Ms Burnet, only got a briefing this morning on such a major bill which is ramming through a change to the planning system to enable ministers to do special deals for mates to put up developments that will suit their vested interests and the interests of people who are donors to the Liberal Party, providing favours for their mates. It stinks on every level. Ramming through this legislation is bad enough, but doing it through abusing the Standing Orders so that we and the community do not even have time to prepare the response to have it properly debated in the parliament.
Let us be clear, they are doing this because they desperately want to get this off the table before Christmas. They are ramming it through before Christmas because they know what will happen over Christmas time. Councils will speak to their community at every single Christmas event, at everything they are talking about over January, and they will know. The community will understand.
This is about the Liberals and their ministers reaching in and making decisions for developers and utterly cutting out the community’s voice. Cutting out councils, cutting out the community’s voice, cutting out their own planning system, which they have lauded since they brought in as being the best thing that has ever happened to Tasmanian planning.
It is clearly not good enough for a few people who did not get their development assessed. We know that we have had the majority of developments get passed by councils across Tasmania. The evidence of the Local Government Association is that 95 per cent of things get approved. Most of them do not even come to councils for discussion, but if one of those things that does not even make it to a council for discussion gets knocked off by the Liberals’ own planning system and the developer does not like it, they can go straight to the minister. They can wine and dine him or her and do whatever they need to put the pressure on to say, ‘How about it?’
It is a recipe for corruption. It is leading Tasmania down the worst possible path. Why on Earth would the Greens support the Suspension of Standing Orders to provide yet another level of abuse to parliament in bringing both of these bills on today? It is an absolute disgrace what is happening here. The Liberals know that the community can see it, and they sure can when you have the head of the Local Government Association, Mick Tucker, talking about it, when you have mayors all around the state talking about it and doing media. It is a rare day in Tasmania when you get mayors doing media on anything other than nice stories, particularly changes to the planning legislation. I think we would all agree that is a very loud, concerted voice from councils, and it is not self-serving. They are there to serve their community. They are there to make sure that the community has a voice.
We absolutely reject the bills, we reject the abuse of the Standing Orders, we reject the disrespect of the leader of government business and the whole process around this. We understood there were going to be cognate bills. Luckily, they have read the room and they are not going to try to stitch together two bills so that we only have one vote and one set of speaking time for these two bills, which are seeking to reach in and utterly transform the planning system in the worst possible way. The Greens will not be supporting this.
