Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

Consistency and Cohesion in Decision MakingACTPLA plays a central role in the system and is the decision maker under the Planning Act.It is obliged to consider advice from referral agencies but is not generally obliged to act inaccordance with the advice. A consistent issue raised by developers was that they can receiveseveral requests for further information, and then have to go through two, three or morerounds of discussions with agencies to address matters such as parking, traffic and wastemanagement, after the conditional DA approval has been issued by ACTPLA.It would appear that officials in their respective agencies are focussed on providing advicefrom their particular perspective and do not view a development application in its widercontext. At its worst, the system can become adversarial between agencies or betweenagencies and applicants.A similar focus on the increment and not the whole was raised in connection with proposedvariations to the Territory Plan, which contributors to the Review suggested were oftendebated without the benefit of a holistic view of the issues at hand.Implications of Split ResponsibilitiesSome separation of planning and land functions is appropriate to avoid conflicts or perceivedconflicts of interest. Indeed, this is one of the major weaknesses of Option 2 outlined above –it puts the Government’s land development arm and statutory planning authority together inone agency. A further example of such conflicts raised with the Review emerges whenACTPLA becomes engaged, as it is at Eastlake, as developer.With separate administrative entities there are benefits in terms of transparency and rights ofappeal. There are also costs in terms of administrative coherence and an ability to respondeffectively and efficiently to government policy priorities. In a separated structure, process isparamount and, while good processes are crucial to public administration, governments andpublic services cannot succeed without a strong focus on outcomes. It would be a mistake toassume that, in weighing this balance, separation necessarily delivers superior publicaccountability. Often the result has been that there is no clear decision-maker who can beheld responsible for either outcomes or delays.The inevitable outcomes of the administrative fragmentation of the planning and landdevelopment system is that time, cost and quality of development suffer. Although somedivision of responsibility is inevitable, and desirable, the evidence of the difficultiesencountered in dealing with the crisis in housing affordability suggests there is a pressingneed to move towards a greater level of functional integration.Administrative Arrangements Changes: 187