The Greens, through Mark Parnell MLC, have come to the defence of local government and the inner rim councils. 


He has foreshadowed a motion in the upper house which he will be bringing to a vote on the next Wednesday of sitting after the winter break, being around the middle of September

The motion concerns the Governments preempting the Expert Panel report on planning reform. They did this by determining that the planning approval powers of the inner rim councils be transferred to the development assessment commission for all developments over 4 storeys in height. 

The presumption we are told is that councils are not equipped to deal with this scale of development. 

Not that we have had much such development in Unley but we have shown in my opinion that we most certainly can. The recent redevelopment of the old Julia Farr Centre for a multi storey residential retirement village is proof of this.

Mark called for submissions from the affected councils, and their elected members, to demonstrate that we at local government supported his bill. We did, across the board, showing that he was not pushing his own barrow.

In his report he made reference to Unley’s joint submission and to separate submissions by Cr Hewitson and myself. I responded in your(our) defence because your(our) opportunity to contribute to what is developed is under threat by the Government’s action.

His speech can be found on his website.

PS. He has correctly identified that the Expert Panel’s ideas will also need great scrutiny as well, as I indicated recently in another blog post. I will comment more on that in a future blog post.