The ACT Labor Government may have gone, but they are still slugging it out in the suburbs over some of its planning policies. A case came up in Yarralumla last week in which both sides can perhaps claim to be victim, and there are probably more to come. It may sound like a boring little microcosm, but there are wider lessons. It may well be that a lot of people voted against Labor because they saw its planning policies wrecking their neighbourhoods, but the fall-out goes beyond the election result because decisions on the ground have to be made according to the law as it was at the time of the application. A new government can only act prospectively.
In Yarralumla, residents objected to the redevelopment of a block that contained one dwelling (a single-storey semi-detached) by adding two more dwellings. The development was proposed by the superannuation fund of Maureen Dwyer, her sister Patricia Scanlan and Roger Phillips. They made their application when planning laws were swayed in favour of urban in-fill. The policy was to increase densities and reduce urban sprawl. Part of it would enable people to build granny flats to keep families together _ the acceptable face of redevelopment. Certainty was a key part of the policy: if your proposal fitted the building “”footprint” it would be approved. The balance was in favour of developers and against amenity of existing residents and as developers took unforeseen advantage of it, residents kicked up an almighty fuss and the Government changed the rules and the application of the rules in favour of residents, several times. Each time arguably achieving a better balance. Ultimately it did not save the government, and there is probably still work to be done to get the balance right. None the less it leaves people who applied under the old rules in a pickle.
Take Mrs Dwyer, for example. She says she applied in good faith. The proposal allowed her low-income sister to move into a good suburb and keep family together. She says a ratty house with ramshackle out-sheds will be converted to three pleasant dwellings which will occupy no more ground area than permitted by a single dwelling _ 35 per cent of the 1500 square metre block. She is not a big-style developer, but investing for a nest egg. They paid their betterment tax of $32,500 (and have paid interest on it for seven months) and spent $10,000 on architects to meet departmental requirements. The neighbours, however, see it differently.
They are outraged that their leafy suburb of single residences is being transmogrified. They can tolerate a few dual occupancies for grannies without divided title, but object to divided title and certainly object to triple occupancies where there was one before. Part of the residents argument was accepted by the Landsdown inquiry and under present rules the development would not be allowed. But Mrs Dwyer applied under the old rules. The residents successfully objected to the Land and Planning Appeals Board. Mrs Dwyer’s group appealed on a point of law to the Supreme Court. Initially the Department of Environment, Land and Planning was going to let the residents and developer (for want of a better word) slug it out until the new Minister Gary Humphries stepped in and said it should send its solicitor in to negotiate a settlement or failing that to defend the board’s decision in favour of the residents.
This is where views differ. The residents say the department favours developers because it wanted to go lame when this pro-residents decision was under attack and in another case it appealed itself against pro-residents decision. They say residents should not find themselves in court facing huge bills for defending their existing residential amenity. The department says it looks at each board decision objectively and if it thinks the board wrong it will appeal and if it thinks it right it will do nothing, just accepting the court’s decision. The Dwyer group says the board made errors and they are entitled to go to court to get them corrected _ though they bemoan the expense. No-one is going to win here. Both sides are victims. It is the expensive, inconvenient result of bad government policy. Not even the government responsible won. The in-fill bandwagon, perhaps conceived and driven in the desire to grab support from the big-end of town or to join some Federal Government fad, was policy without the best long-term interests of Canberrans in view. It is possible that the petrol policy carries a similar taint. It was a short-term electoral fix which cost many Canberrans dearly.
A plan to fix the high-petrol-price legacy of the one-garage-per-suburb policy of 25 years ago required a longer-term more-balance strategy. No doubt the current sentencing idiocy in NSW, if implemented, will have similar fall-out. Ultimately it is up to the electorate to express distaste _ through letters, opinions polls, talk-back and the ballot box _ for knee-jerk and unbalanced policies, so that politicians know there is no mileage in them, even in the short-term. They are presumably well aware that they do not work in the long term, but it is so many elections away that it does not matter.