South Australian councils’ peak body has lost faith in the State Government’s planning reform agenda after months of growing tension over controversial changes.
Repeated small changes by the Planning Minister over the past six months have restricted the development approval role of councils in the CBD and inner rim as part of the Government’s overall agenda to move councils to a strategic rather than hands-on planning role.
That agenda (including an independent planning review) has been broadly supported by councils and their representative body the Local Government Association – until now.
“When the planning reforms process was announced, the LGA and member councils were pretty supportive of that, because we accepted that the Development Act, the Development Plan Amendment process … [was] taking way too long,” Lorraine Rosenberg, the LGA’s acting president and Mayor of Onkaparinga, told InDaily.
“We brought into that in good faith.”
However, she said there had now been a range of smaller reforms which had “circumvented the whole reform process”.
“We are overall not happy with that circumvention of the system. What’s happening is Government seems to be cherry-picking off bits of it and rushing through … bits of it without a great deal of broad consultation.
“And it also feels from an LGA perspective that most of them are designed to alienate elected councils.”
Rosenberg is leading the LGA while president David O’Loughlin campaigns for a seat in the upcoming state election.
The association’s decision to go public this week about its concerns was spurred by a new spate of planning reforms it says were sprung on it by the Government without consultation.
On Thursday, Planning Minister John Rau used the last sitting day of Parliament for the year to enact changes moving the approval process for inner-rim developments over four storeys from local councils to the State Government.
At the same time, Adelaide City Council lost its statutory referral powers for major developments in the city – something Town Hall says it wasn’t expecting.
“We had written to the Minister; we had said where the five councils were standing,” Rosenberg said.
“We’re not happy about the process of taking the decisions away from [local government], however if that’s the way you’re going, then the very least of the compromise would be that some council representation could be part of that decision.
“We hadn’t got an answer to that letter and while waiting for the answer to that, he moved for the regulation to go into parliament. But the regulation had gone a step further than even what we had been talking about.”
The Government reforms are part of an overall shift to get local government out of the development approval process, which has been going on for the past decade, according to Planning Institute of SA president Darren Starr.
“There’s been a history of trying to shift councils and communities into this higher-level thinking.
“There’s been a consistent move towards that.”
Starr said there was no sign that the pace of reform had accelerated recently.
