Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—The National Capital Authority, as anybody who has observed ACT planning over a period of time will note, has been something of a political football. Headlines have regularly been generated around its activities and its role, and questions about the planning of the city, particularly in its national capital manifestation, have been very much argued over and fought over throughout the years. Yet, as Senator Lundy has noted as the chair of the committee, what the joint standing committee has produced in this case is a unanimous report which is designed to attempt to take a step away from that divisive and acrimonious approach to the planning of Canberra. I think it is because all the members of the committee saw very clearly that it is a nonsense to have a single, relatively small city of 330,000 people or so run by two separate planning systems which are in conflict, or perceived to be in conflict, with each other. It was the view of the committee that some better way needed to be found to ensure that the city was planned in a way which did not pit the national capital role and the community of Canberra role against each other.

I also commend to the Senate and to the government the scheme which the committee has put forward to attempt to resolve that very difficult problem. The committee has essentially recommended that we attempt for the first time to integrate the two planning regimes. We have two plans: a national capital plan and a territory plan. We have two planning systems around those two plans, and we have two planning authorities administering each of those plans. We have not proposed the integration of all three of those components or elements but we have certainly suggested that there be a single, integrated planning document with clear boundaries between the two areas of planning responsibility. We suggest that planning responsibility be aligned with ownership of the land—where the Commonwealth owns land, essentially it should have planning responsibility for that land and, where the ACT government owns the land, it should have planning responsibility. Those who are familiar with the present system would know that that, unfortunately, is not the case—that there are areas of territory land which are effectively controlled by the Commonwealth and vice versa.

We hope that this is an opportunity to realign those planning responsibilities and to establish a clearer, more workable system of running a national capital with the values that Canberra clearly has, and the chair has talked about those values. I expect that this would involve—as this process goes forward—some retreat by the NCA geographically speaking away from some areas of the territory which it has had primary planning responsibility for in favour of the ACT government. But the report strongly suggests that that be achieved by ensuring that the ACT planning process builds in very strongly those national capital values which are so important to the planning of the whole city. In a sense, those values imbue the planning of the city from the top to the bottom of the territory. It is not just about the Parliamentary Triangle; the whole city is an example of fine, world-class planning, and those values need to be understood and adopted by each planning authority no matter what its actual responsibility for particular geographical areas might be.

I also want to touch on the question of the cuts to the NCA’s budget. The inquiry heard persistent and loud complaints about the effect of those cuts on the operations of the NCA and the capacity of the NCA to plan a world-class city in those circumstances. We saw a combination of the increased efficiency dividend and quite specific cuts to the NCA resulting in some very serious and concerning developments. We saw that public facilities—like the Carillon, Blundells’ Cottage and the National Capital Exhibition Centre, which is where people get a sense of what the planning of Canberra is all about—have been adversely affected by those very serious cuts. We were told before the cuts were implemented—indeed, we were told before the last election—that there were inefficiencies in the way in which government ran those areas, that their structures were top-heavy in their administration and that overlapping responsibilities between the federal and territory planning roles would account for an amount that could be saved in terms of rationalising that role. That was all found to be essentially bunkum. What the report found is that there were serious compromisings of the capacity of Canberra to be planned well by virtue of those cuts. Particularly, the committee focused on the $46.3 million cut to the Griffin legacy project, which has a huge impact on the planning of that northern part of the Parliamentary Triangle which abuts Constitution Avenue. I welcome very strongly the committee’s encouragement to the Commonwealth to restore those funds. That would be crucial to the capacity of the ACT government to be able to make decisions about the planning of that part of Canberra in a proactive and effective way into the future.

I must also say that claims which have been made in the past about the National Capital Authority being some kind of political tool, particularly of the former government, were claims that were not substantiated or borne out by this inquiry. The evidence—and it was very strongly asserted by the NCA itself—is that it always made decisions on the basis of what was best planning practice, not what was dictated by political masters. It is true that the committee has recommended that the board of the NCA should be restructured: it should be larger and it should be appointed in a more transparent way to reflect particular skills in planning and design that need to be present on a board like that. It also recommended a need to have a more national focus, with people from outside the ACT, but the committee did not find that the board had been previously used as a political tool and that this process needed to end.

I want to finish my remarks by saying that one of the possible by-products of this inquiry was that the Chief Executive of the NCA, Ms Annabelle Pegrum, chose to announce her retirement during the inquiry. I want to say that it is perhaps not very helpful at this point in time to reflect on the circumstances which might have led her to make that decision, but I will say that I think her legacy to the NCA was one of enormous quality. She had held that role for a number of years, through a number of different chairs of the NCA. The commitment and dedication that she brought to that role as a practising architect are reflected in the quality of so many things that the NCA was able to achieve. I do not want this opportunity to go past without being able to record the great contribution she made as the Chief Executive of the NCA to the high-quality national capital that we see around us today. Many things happened during the life of the previous government to enhance the vision of Canberra, and the NCA was responsible for the delivery of most of those things. The tribute to her, the success of her contribution in that role as CEO, is the great national capital we see around us, particularly with those enhancements.

I want to indicate that the committee unanimously felt that there should be a world-class national capital in Canberra and that the planning authority should be resourced to maintain the excellent planning values of the city, and the NCA was affirmed in this process as the custodian of those very high-quality values. We did not find, as some thought we might find, that the NCA should be replaced or subsumed; we affirmed the role of the NCA. I think that members of this place would do well to focus on the need to make sure that this body is capable in the future of delivering the kind of high-quality national capital that all Australians should be proud of. I think that the effect of the recommendations made by the committee will be that there is a strengthening of that role by the National Capital Authority. If we remove the tensions and friction which have been characteristic of the relationship in the past, we will certainly achieve that goal into the future.

Question agreed to.