Archive: Ministerial Interventions
Last Updated 14/12/10
(13/8/10 - P) They're a way of life these days, aren't they?
Planning Minister Justin Madden this week table an annual report on interventions in planning matters to parliament.
The Brumby Labor Government intervened in 233 planning matters last year to secure jobs and investment during the global financial crisis, continue efforts to rebuild after the 2009 bushfires and address outdated anomalies in the planning system. Click here to see the Minister's media release.
MRRA Says:
Securing jobs and investments?
Crickey, we thought Mr. Madden was the Minister for Planning, not Jobs and Investments.
With the way environment and consultation are being stripped out of the Victorian planning system in favour of what appears to be purely business plans and priorities, we certainly wouldn't think of him as the Minister for Sustainability or Democracy either! In fact, it raises the thought: do we actually have a planning system in Victoria anymore?
We went looking for details of the interventions, but couldn't find hide nor hair of the annual report.
Yeah, we believed Mr Thwaites as Planning Minister when he said this government would make interventions more transparent back when. We remember that.
These days however, if it's not an intervention it's departmental pressure or ministerial amendment or another announcement that the Minister for Planning has become the Responsible Authority for major projects, which basically means the Minister has most or all of the say. Which some see as the developer holding all the cards.
And we can't stop thinking about the way people's rights were ripped off them by the Transportation Major Projects Facilitation Act (hi everyone in Footscray who didn't get notice that their homes are to be demolished), and the way rights are going to disappear with the Development Assessment Committees, changes to the Planning and Environment Act, and likely the Environment Effects Statement Act, and the way everything is being looked at in terms of economics only, and so on and so on... and so on.
Nor can we get it out of our minds that somewhere, most of us in active community groups are probably on a police file that gets shared with private 'investors', and that this is a practice that appears to not only be condoned but defended by this 'transparent' and 'democratic' government.