A Planner
The only word I can use to adequately describe Tasmania’s contorted planning laws, together with mooted amendments, is ‘excruciating’.
There are now so many twists and turns that a once fairly straightforward system has become a tangled mess – to the extent that it would almost be better to go back to the drawing board and start all over.
That said, it is important for us to go back yet another step. What is entitled as the ‘planning system’ is in fact not and has never been. Tasmania’s basic ‘planning’ framework – the RMPS (in its unmangled form) – was essentially a professional and methodical way of responding to proposed developments and harmful activities. As such it is not a bad system (in its unmangled form, that is!).
But THAT IS NOT PLANNING.
PLANNING IS what you do when you envisage the future and set things on the road to creating that future. It includes proactive engagement of business – in the public interest. It means you know where you are going and, just as importantly, you know where you don’t want to go.
PLANNING IS NOT just waiting for a Gunns or Walker Corporation or multi-storey carpark venture capitalist to turn up and propose a nightmare and then have a big bunfight and belittle the opponents as anti-development and then fight elections over them and so divide and rule the population. That is not planning. It is simply a contorted and protracted election strategy.
With or without the new amendments, Tasmania has no real planning system.
This is what happens when you dare to have a progressive vision: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/17/2545220.htm There are many jobs; there is huge investment; there is a huge public interest; the future is being served.
Tasmania’s future at this critical juncture in history is not being determined with a sense of holistic vision or forward planning. mad hatter schemes are proposed to look like we are going somewhere, but there is no coherence nor empathy with the electorate.
It is up to those who do have a vision to make that vision so visible and palpable to ordinary Tasmanians that the government will have no choice but to bend to the public will. We can’t rely on government to provide vision. They are operating in a virtual vacuum.
