News - Planning & development

At the latest land ballot run by the ACT's development arm the Land Development Agency, some 900 families were registered - but there were only 156 blocks available!

That's a lot of people - families - who missed out.

The next ballot is in May for 288 blocks at Bridgewater - Franklin. So there will be a whole heap of people missing out yet again.

This is despite the ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope's claim on 24 January that some 2850 blocks have "been released".

Of course this isn't new...

Last year there were 600 people present for a ballot of just 50 blocks. And a lot of people walking away empty-handed made for bad media pictures the next day...

The ACT Government is now running a pre-draw of people to match the number of blocks available plus a handful more, and only those people need attend the ballot. So for the 16 February ballot of 156 blocks, 216 people were pre-drawn.

Ballots for that many blocks can take a long time to run. This means that they don't have hundreds of people waiting around essentially all day in vain.

But would it be cynical to point out that it also avoids embarrassing front-page media of hundreds of people who missed out yet again?

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