NSW-style planning review panel urged as resident groups slam move against ACAT appeals

A NSW-style planning review panel should replace the ACT Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal instead of removing third-party appeal rights, a residents’ group has urged.

The Inner South Canberra Community Council’s submission to a Legislative Assembly committee inquiring into the ACT Government’s Planning (Territory Priority Project) Amendment Bill is one of several from resident groups opposed to the bill, which makes public housing and health projects exempt from appeals to ACAT in a bid to speed up such development.

The general theme from the submissions is that the number of appeals do not justify such a drastic response and will only result in public housing tenants living in sub-standard accommodation or more court proceedings.

The ISCCC submission says that ACAT processes are legalistic, intimidating, costly and very time-consuming for third parties such as community councils and should be overhauled or replaced.

It argues that an independent, expert body such as the NSW Local Planning Panels would be more appropriate for the review of ACT development application approvals than ACAT.

With only two reported ACAT decisions involving third-party appeals on public housing proposals in the last five years, ISCCC says there is no creditable justification for the bill.

It calls for the return of pre-DA consultation but making it formally part of the ‘design review’ process rather than an add-on to avoid delays.

Griffith Narrabundah Community Association, which had been involved in a number of ACAT actions that ended in approvals being overturned or DAs being withdrawn, says in its submission that the government is simply shooting the messenger.

“If the Government feels that too many DAs lodged by Housing ACT (HACT) and approved by the Planning Authority are being identified by the ACAT as non-compliant, surely the best response would be for HACT to improve the quality of the DAs it puts forward and for the Planning Authority to do its job properly and correctly identify and refuse to approve non-compliant DAs,” it says.

GNCA argues that too many substandard and non-compliant DAs are being approved by the Planning Authority, and part of the problem is that HACT is commissioning substandard housing designs, and it is up to the responsible ministers to stop this from happening.

It also says ACAT’s procedures and processes could be streamlined to ensure faster decisions being made.

ACAT should be restricted to only deciding whether the DA as originally submitted is compliant, final hearings take place within a week of the circulation of the plaintiff’s statement when all parties are agreed that there are no legal matters to be determined and lawyers are kept out of planning appeals.

GNCA scoffed at the notion that residents groups were deliberately holding up public housing projects

“The possibility of the planning system really being hijacked by a small group of intelligent inner suburban actors who use their skills to delay public housing projects is implausible,” it says.

“Such attempts would be unsuccessful unless there were other major flaws in the system.”

GNCA says all five cases it was involved in all included breaches of some mandatory planning rule.

“If the Government believes that this is an undesirable outcome, the proper cure is to change the planning rules (which it has done in part, but in an oblique way, with its new planning system),” it says.

“It seems that a ban on third-party appeals would result in a significant increase in substandard and flawed development approvals.

“Consequently, any argument that the ACAT process delay these projects is false, as none of them should have been approved if ACTPLA had been doing its job effectively.”

North Canberra Community Council stresses its support for public housing but says that erasing a basic democratic right would only risk “opening the door to substandard public housing in the future, that would have been rejected otherwise”.

It says that according to the Auditor-General, only 7 per cent of public housing projects were appealed to ACAT from 2019-23, and of these, more than half were found deficient, requiring reassessment or redesign.

“As a direct result of the ACAT process, it is likely that many more projects were actually amended after the appeal was made, but before the case was heard,” NCCC says.

It says the government only has itself to blame for not meeting its public housing targets.