Media Release

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Coogee Election Campaign: Rally against Overdevelopment. Part 3A takes your say away!

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A Rally organised by The Greens because the community has had enough of being ignored.

Three development proposals in the Randwick Local Government Area are aiming to be classified as Part 3A - the current site of the Coogee Bay Hotel and the surrounding block (Coogee Bay Rd/Vicar St), Montefiore Aged Care Centre at Randwick North and Randwick Racecourse.

Under Part 3A applicants can override the Local Environment Plan and local Council processes, leapfrogging to the Minister's desk.

This Part 3A is an amendment to the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 passed into law in 2005. It was supported in NSW Parliament by both Labor and the Liberal/Coalition. It was not supported by the Greens.

The Minister, Tony Kelly, will exercise discretion in making this decision.

In the Greens' view ministerial discretion of this kind is not good for democracy.

It's not good for democracy because:

  1. The community is not able to fully participate in decision-making processes
  2. The discretion can ignore local planning laws that were already decided following full community consultation
  3. Ignoring local planning laws means ignoring height, bulk, traffic, noise, overshadowing, character and heritage among other aspects.
  4. It takes away certainty meaning that communities are forever expending energy, resources and anxiety simply trying to defend the limits they believed were in place.
  5. The State Environmental Planning Policies, known as SEPPs, are not scrutinised by Parliament which means they may not always directly reflect what the legislation intended.
  6. A SEPP that sets a qualifying criterion of $100 million in order to qualify to leapfrog Councils simply encourages developments to be bigger than they need to be.
  7. This incentive discourages large corporations from identifying with and respecting the sensitivities of their surrounding communities
  8. This Part 3A, ironically, was intended to look after infrastructure for our State. Infrastructure in the Randwick LGA is already stretched to the limit. It appears that planning for improvements to transport, hospital, emergency services, schools hasn't had a look in while BIG projects with BIG money with a BIG community impact get BIG attention.
  9. It leaves open the potential for criticism regarding obligations based on corporate donations.

Something else transparent that respects consultative processes, environmental, economic and social impacts, encourages long term sustainable planning and gets the balance right between local and regional infrastructure is urgently needed.

David Shoebridge, Greens MLC will be talking about this at Saturday's Rally.

Petitions will be available to sign - both the ongoing petition to keep the Coogee Bay Hotel to its 12 metre height limit (already having more than 16000 signatories thanks to dedicated local activists) and a petition specifically targeting the repeal of Part 3A.

CONTACT: Sue Doran, Greens Candidate for Coogee