Building approvals delayed
Proper Council decision making could be endangered by Queensland Labor’s bid to force councils to wait for development assessment panels to give the green light for major building approvals according to Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam
Mr Hallam said that far from giving more power to the people, the move would give faceless, unelected officials unprecedented influence over the future development of communities.
He said Ms Bligh had tried to hoodwink voters into believing there was something underhand with the way councils dealt with major developments.
“The truth is that council development approvals are decided openly by democratically elected people after often lengthy public debate.
“The recommendations of council planning officers are publicly available and if councils do not agree with those recommendations they have to state the reasons.
“I’d like to see that level of accountability at the State Government level.”
Mr Hallam said if Ms Bligh and Labor were so concerned that the public’s right to decide the future of their community was being eroded she should have independent panels running the ruler over some of the planning decisions made by her own Cabinet.
“In fact, I call on Ms Bligh to publicly release all of the departmental briefing papers regarding Cabinet decisions on planning matters over the past three years.
“I’m sure the community would want to know more about what went into the Government decision to quietly allow thousands of coal seam gas wells to dot Queensland’s landscape.
“And what was really behind Cabinet’s move to run roughshod over the concerns of the Sunshine Coast community and put planning powers for property giant Stockland’s massive Caloundra South project into the hands of the unelected and unaccountable Urban Land Development Authority?
“This move is nothing but a duplicitous grab for votes that will jam up the building approval process and end up taking away the rights Ms Bligh says she wants to protect.”
Mr Hallam said the Crime and Misconduct Commission had spent millions of dollars in 2005 investigating development decisions by the Gold Coast City Council and found no irregularities.
“LGAQ has supported every integrity reform in Queensland for the past decade but this one is ridiculous,” he said.
