When Premier Brumby announced two months ago that several thousand development applications would be reviewed to remove "roadblocks" (like council planning schemes and VCAT hearings!), the reason was supposed to be for more construction jobs to provide much-needed housing. Of course we need jobs and more certainty and more housing, but there are better ways to do that than by removing democratic oversight and legitimate planning controls. This just hands windfall profits to developers to create projects that may not integrate properly with local infrastructure and planning policies (including environmentally-sustainable design to improve water and energy conservation). The democratic, transparent way to tackle the problem is to reduce the exercise of discretion, where planners have to check applications against a range of confusing state and local policies to try and make a balanced decision because nothing is mandatory. If basic zone and Rescode amenity standards were mandatory and gave due weight to local policy (at both council and VCAT), that would provide the certainty that all parties want by greatly simplifying the workload of council planners, speeding up ALL development assessments and all parties would have much greater certainty to plan ahead. Even compliant applications would be assessed much more quickly, and non-compliant ones would just be refused. There’d be no point in a developer appealing such a case to VCAT because approval would depend on amended plans that made it compliant, so there’d be nothing to gain by developers attempting to get "softer" decisions at VCAT, as occurs now. This would also guarantee that all projects would at least meet existing planning controls, improving planning outcomes while still ensuring that councils and the community had a voice and slashing appeals to VCAT in the process. Most projects are "held up" by council assessments and VCAT hearings simply because they are non-compliant ambit claims. These sorts of developments are invariably appealed to VCAT where amended plans to reduce their worst excesses are lodged to increase the chances of winning a permit. SOS doesn’t have a problem with legitimate fast-tracking of planning permits – as long as that means bumping important projects ahead in the planning assessment queue rather than not bothering about whether they meet all relevant policies or not. Ian Wood SOS President
