Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories, I have pleasure in speaking to this report, which was tabled out of sittings on 16 July 2008. It is entitled The way forward: inquiry into the role of the National Capital Authority.

The committee, through this inquiry, has examined the current planning arrangements with a view to reducing red tape and confusing duplication in the Australian Capital Territory but at the same time ensuring that the Commonwealth has a direct and enduring role in the future of Canberra. The committee focused on the administration of the National Capital Plan and the role that the National Capital Authority has within its charter and the act.

Canberra is one of very few planned cities, and everyone who comes here is struck by the beauty of the landscape architecture—the way in which the city is built into the landscape. This is, of course, the specific design by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, who won a competition to design Australia’s national capital. One of the issues that were traversed very well in the inquiry was: what is the Commonwealth’s relationship with the national capital and what role do they have in ensuring that its particular design, unique as it is, continues long into the future?

The mechanism by which this is ensured is the National Capital Plan and the act, which is currently administered by the National Capital Authority. So, many of the recommendations associated with this report look to the way forward in the operation of the National Capital Authority in the administration of the plan. The vision that we have expressed in this report identifies the need for a significant upgrade. Since self-government of the ACT in 1989 we have had almost a demarcation organised between the territory government and the Commonwealth government, and the committee felt that that needed to be renewed and some structural changes made to the National Capital Authority to allow the Commonwealth to truly assert its interests in the national capital and for the territory government to gain the clarity it is seeking in its role with both land administration and planning jurisdiction.

Unfortunately for the National Capital Authority, the organisation endured cuts that, according to the committee’s findings, were not commensurate with the overlap that we foreshadowed and identified as part of our deliberations. The committee’s findings were that those cuts went too deep and have not permitted the National Capital Authority to discharge its duties in accordance with both the aspiration of reducing red tape and the decision to make the organisation more effective and more focused on its role. So obviously we have made recommendations in relation to the necessary resources for it to discharge its role and, perhaps more importantly with an eye to the future, the resources necessary to upgrade the National Capital Plan and have it work effectively with the territory planning authorities and other organisations to allow the upgrade to proceed. I am sure senators will appreciate that planning in the ACT raises the intense interest and passions of many different stakeholder groups and individuals in our community. It is a truly worthy project to get right, and the recommendations contained in this report point to a very comprehensive agenda to achieve those outcomes.

The committee identified three objectives that we would like to achieve as part of this upgrade plan in The way forward. The committee’s first objective is to ensure that the Commonwealth protect and promote the unique design of Canberra because it represents the intrinsic character of the national capital. The committee’s second objective is, where possible, to align land administration with planning jurisdiction, provided the first objective is achieved. The third objective is to foster greater cooperation and collaboration between the Commonwealth and the ACT governments on planning and related matters.

With these objectives in mind we have put forward a series of recommendations that look at the different roles of the National Capital Authority and how they ought to be constructed in the future. In particular, the emphasis has been on governance and administration. The committee have recommended that we overhaul the governance and administration arrangements for the National Capital Authority, choosing the model of stronger statutory independence with much more stringent reporting lines to the Commonwealth parliament to ensure the appropriate level of Commonwealth oversight in what is truly the national capital interest in planning in the ACT.

Another area of great concern, which I am sure my colleagues can relate to, is the way that transport planning has not been a feature of consideration of the function of the National Capital Plan in recent times. This is partly a product of the overlap between the two planning systems but it also points to a need for far greater integration into the National Capital Plan of planning, transport issues and transport sustainability. What we found in the course of this inquiry is that we were not able to resolve the final planning matters; hence our recommendations for an upgrade. And it was further made difficult by the fact that the National Capital Authority came forward with some pretty comprehensive suggestions and quite interesting ideas, but of course other submitters and participants in the inquiry were not able to fully analyse the proposals that had been put forward because it was at the committee hearings that they first received a public airing.

I would like to acknowledge the secretariat and the amazing work that they did in preparing the report and supporting the public hearings. I would like to mention them all by name: Stephen Boyd, Stephanie Mikac, Justin Baker, Margaret Atkin, Frances Wilson and Natasha Petrovic. Thank you very much for your hard work. I would also like to acknowledge other members of the committee, including my deputy chair Mr Patrick Secker, and particularly mention Annette Ellis and Senator Gary Humphries, who I think is going to be speaking to the report as well. This was a bipartisan report, and I would particularly like to acknowledge the time that Senator Humphries put in to achieving this result. It is quite an extraordinary thing, given the controversial nature—the cross-government nature of planning in the ACT—that we were able to reach a bipartisan conclusion on a way forward. I think it is a great credit to the process of the committee system that we were able to do that.

I would like to also thank everyone who participated in the inquiry. We had many submissions from many organisations which had to come forth with their thoughts without too much notice. It was a pretty tight time frame for a committee inquiry that covered such complex issues, so I would particularly like to thank all of those concerned citizens not just here in Canberra but from around the country whose passion and interest in the national capital is unfailing for the insights and inspiration that they gave us as committee members to help us find a way forward to resolve the problems and issues and to take planning in the ACT to the next level of maturity 20 years after self-government. I commend the report to the Senate.