Media Release - The Liberals have the wrong planning priorities

Once again, the Liberal Party has focused on the wrong planning priorities to support housing.

Like the recently failed attempts to introduce Development Assessment Panels, the announcement today is a reform that will have no impact on housing delivery and does nothing to finish the job for Tasmania.

LGAT President and Break O’Day Council mayor Mick Tucker said that today’s announcement relies on isolated anecdotes at best.

“The fact is our existing development assessment process is the fastest in the country, and issues with requests for information and councils exceeding their statutory timeframes are extremely rare,” Mayor Tucker said.

For example, over the past three years, only 11% of all discretionary applications have had a ‘stop clock’ on the statutory timeframe, which includes referrals to state agencies and where applicants were requested to provide further information. In these instances, an average of just 16 days was added to the assessment period, including applicant response time.

This reform amounts to another terrible waste of planning resources working on the wrong priorities.

Our sector is calling on the next State Government to focus on the critical outdated or missing parts of our planning system, not tinker around with reforms like those announced today.

The challenges being experienced within our planning system are the result of a planning framework that the government has failed to maintain. For example:

• Our planning legislation, the Land Use Planning and Approvals Act 1993, is now over three decades old and was literally made for a different century.

• The Tasmanian Planning Policies (TPPs), which should express the State Government’s policy approach and expectations of development, still don’t exist after over seven years of work.

• The three Regional Land Use Strategies (RLUSs), which are critical to guiding local development and increasing certainty for proponents, are now over 15 years old.

• We lack an infrastructure contributions framework to remove the first mover disadvantage and share the costs of new infrastructure across the developers that will benefit from it.

Local government stands ready to work with the future government on planning reforms that will support our growing local communities.