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

prescriptive. This has resulted in those documents becoming even more voluminous anddifficult for developers to interpret.These complexities and time pressures also impact on private sector development, which areunder their own commercial imperatives. A review by the Government’s Industry ReferenceGroup of the delivery of capital works and projects associated with land development identifiedthe main problems in the following terms:• the large number of studies and the similarity of many of the studies required;• a lack of commitment from government agencies to the outcomes from each step in theprocess;• a lack of clarity about who has a mandate for decisions;• too many agency circulations;• demands for unnecessary detail in EDPs; and• planning work not being completed prior to raw land being sold at auction.The implications of the current system were highlighted in a Submission to the Review:... in a city state of 360,000 people, and without the imposition of an extra level ofgovernment as found in other jurisdictions in Australia, the current structures do notallow us to be as nimble as we should otherwise be to respond to critical matters suchas capital works delivery and housing affordability.ACTPLA, LAPS and LDA have recently agreed to changes to the existing planning anddevelopment process in an attempt to minimise delays caused by the requirement for bothStructural and Concept planning, and to seek ways of creating better knowledge transferbetween the planning and development stages of the process. So long as the administrativefunctions remain under separate control centres the Review believes that the systemicimpediments of the current system will be difficult to overcome.Strategies for Addressing Housing AffordabilityTo address the decline in housing affordability, in 2006 the ACT Government initiated anaccelerated land release program. Recognising that land was the primary component of priceinflation, the Government responded to the growing affordability gap by dramaticallyincreasing the supply of residential land to the market in its forward release program to besold by the Land Development Agency (LDA), commencing with the 2006-07 Land ReleaseStrategy. The new priority accorded to land release was also reflected in the transfer ofadministrative responsibility for development of the land release program to the ChiefMinister’s portfolio, later culminating in establishment of the Department of Land andProperty Services (LAPS).Notwithstanding the higher community priority accorded to housing affordability, and theinitial land release increases in 2006 and 2007, market demand continued to strongly outstripsupply. By 2007 it was becoming clear that housing affordability was an increasinglysignificant and complex issue requiring a sharpened policy focus and a substantial increase inSustainability, Housing Affordability and Transport: 305