News - Planning & development

The PDF is a bi-monthly meeting of people from the ACT Planning and Land Authority, community councils, and industry groups like PIA, HIA and RAIA.

At the February PDF, key topics were findings from a childcare needs assessment, and implementation of the new planning system, as detailed in the meeting notes (DOC 44.00 KB) , with the following input from GCC .

Childcare needs assessment

It's official - Gungahlin is under-serviced for childcare places.

The target is 0.2 places per child under 5 years, and Gungahlin has 0.16 places. North Canberra and the City have substantially higher. This perhaps reflects the availability of more premises in the inner city areas (like former preschools), and the ability (if not the preference) of Gungahlin parents to drop children off at these centres on their way to work. Of course, that locks in car use...

Apparently the private childcare operators told this study that they didn't want too many additional places made available - they would say that wouldn't they? Clearly it is in the private operators' interest to keep demand exceeding supply. I wrote to ACT Minister for Health, Children and Community Services Katy Gallagher about this on 20 February:-

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At a recent Planning and Development Forum meetings, ACTPLA presented early findings on the childcare centres needs analysis for Canberra, with those findings indicating around 0.16 places per child available in Gungahlin, vs a benchmark of 0.2 places.

The feedback I gave was that - contrary to the wishes of the childcare industry operators - the ACT Government needs to move to a situation of supply exceeding demand. Only then will there be a situation of competitive pressures to put purchasing power back into the community's hands.
 
Currently we have no choice - we take places wherever we can get them. We end up doing double drop-offs in the morning, and often travel far out of our way to do them, meaning of course we are excluded from using public transport. The impacts are far-reaching.
 
And when the federal government hands something back to taxpayers in the way of rebates, the operators immediately hike their prices and take all of it and then some.
 
And this at the same time as they run "fund raising" programs to get further contributions out of parents to fund toy supply etc. These are commercial operations that leverage communities, whom are "trained" to fund raise for their children's schools, to supplement basic supplies that they should be providing as part of their services anyway!
 
These sorts of inappropriate practices will not go away whenever demand exceeds supply in childcare places.
 
Anything your department can do to speed up the process of allocating more places in Canberra will go a long way towards addressing this market imbalance.

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We received the following reply from the Minister:

From: GALLAGHER
To: Alan Kerlin - GCC President

Date: Thu, Feb 21, 2008
Subject: Child Care in Gungahlin

Thanks Alan,
 
As you may be aware the ACT Government has very few 'levers' where it comes to child care.  The Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services licences operators; a standards and quality control function, and the LDA/ACTPLA can intervene on the supply side with land releases directed specifically at the child care sector.  The ACT Government doesn't have any role in 'allocating places' to child care, per se, other than from a land perspective. The rest of the field is controlled/covered by the Commonwealth. 
 
On the land release side of the equation, I suggest you raise your concerns with Mr Barr as Minister for Planning or Mr Stanhope with respect to land release via the LDA.
 
Please feel free to contact me again if I can be of any further assistance.
 
Regards
 
Brendan Ryan
Chief of Staff
to Katy Gallagher MLA
Deputy Chief Minister

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We'll continue to pursue the issue of available land with Minister Andrew Barr and allocation of places via Senator Kate Lundy and Bob McMullan.


Planning system reform

Jacqui Lavis reported that the revised system would see more regulations in the Planning and Development Act and less in the lease conditions, as this would be easier to enforce and more consistent with other jurisdictions.

Third-party appeals would be banned in town centres, industrial areas and Civic.

Single dwellings in Greenfield development would be exempt from needing to lodge a DA. Private certifiers would instead assess the plans against the Territory Plan. While the simplicity of this will help many people building around Gungahlin, it is not without risk. Certifiers have been central to a number of complaints in other areas, and I questioned the degree of enforcement (and resourcing thereof) that would occur for certifiers found to have breached requirements.

Assurances were given that policing of certifiers would be strenuous and resourced. They would be required to notify ACTPLA of any non-compliance within two days of becoming aware of it, and on-the-spot fines would be available for minor breaches by certifiers or developers.
 

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