In the lead-up to the 2014 state election the Liberal party had a policy to: ‘Immediately after the election ... commence drafting state policies to provide the necessary guidance to councils on how to implement the single statewide planning scheme and plan for Tasmania’s future land use needs.’ The election policy made it clear the policies were to focus on economic development but it offered some hope that development of the proposed statewide planning scheme would be based on new or revised polices. There was no action on planning policies immediately after the 2014 election. Somewhere along the way, for reasons never explained, the state government decided that state policies or other existing policy mechanisms would not be pursued and instead there would be new Tasmanian Planning Policies (TPP) developed.
While the government took its time developing legislation required for the TPPs the statewide planning scheme was given priority and was being developed in the absence of policies. In April 2017 the state government released the documents ‘Tasmanian Planning Policies: Overview and suite of policies’ and ‘Tasmanian Planning Policies: an explanatory document’ and requested public comment on them. The introduction to the explanatory document reiterated the 2014 election policy and also stated: ‘Feedback from local government and a range of stakeholders on the draft Land Use Planning and Approvals (Tasmanian Planning Scheme) Amendment Bill 2015 indicated that the new Tasmanian Planning Policies will address a widely recognised gap in the planning system by providing strategic direction on matters of state interest, guiding councils when they make decisions regarding development and land use planning.’
The legislation to create TPPs was delayed but eventually passed by Parliament in November 2018. But no action was taken on TPPs until September 2021 when the government commenced consultation on the TPP scoping process. The ‘widely recognised gap in the planning system’ has remained unfilled to this day. If the government had treated this issue seriously it would have created legislation and developed the planning policies by the end of 2017 or early 2018, well ahead of the roll-out of the statewide planning scheme which came into effect in the first municipalities in early 2021. Nearly eight years after promising policies immediately after the 2014 state election the state government has not developed planning policies, while the statewide planning scheme is in force in much of the state.
By the time the government develops any TPPs the statewide planning scheme will be in place across the entire state. The TCT’s submission to the consultation process on yet-to-be drafted TPPs was very short and amounted to outlining the contradictory and perplexing history of the Liberal approach to planning policies as outlined above. We also stated that the TPP scoping process is occurring in total isolation from the existing planning system. What we meant by this is that development of the statewide planning scheme has been based on unstated policies that were not presented to the community and these policies are now incorporated into the scheme.
The community is at a great disadvantage by needing to convince the state government to overturn its existing policies, as embodied in the statewide planning scheme, in order to implement any change. If the TPPs had been done first, then the community and government would have been on a (more) level playing field.
This calls into question whether the government really wants to find out what the community thinks. It may be that the state government is going through the motions with consultation but will simply develop TPPs that reflect the policy intent of the existing statewide planning scheme, but perhaps with tweaks to better suit its policy interests.
To assist in addressing this dire situation, the government should admit to the farcical situation where the planning policies are being developed after the scheme is in place and seek to make amends. At a minimum, it must develop and release for public comment a statement of the planning policies that underpin the existing statewide planning scheme and provide detailed justifications for them. This would allow the community to directly challenge the existing policy framework as well as identify what they want to change. The government should make it clear that it is willing to make changes to the policies in response to community comments and that this would flow through to changes to the scheme. More than two months after making our submission we have not received any feedback.
Peter McGlone