Friday, March 14, 2008

Arse about planning -expensive and unreliable

Dick Win's love of VCAT ( 774 this morning ) may be warranted , but it is only skin deep . This great institution is failing because everybody loves it to death and is forgeting what upholds it, and with regard to environmentplanning , - what it cannot do well .
So blindly , he's going to keep funding the overly COSTLY VCAT because he believes "its the best thing since sliced bread? " ! The stockade state continues to up the budget for ROME while the country burns! Kings street gets the funding to review more and more paper - a perfect opportunity for those who can afford the lawyers ----to get decisions past there! Building on a floodplain - why ever not?

VCAT was indeed the jewel in the planning crown, but it cannot remain so while the systems which should support it ,are in tatters -or are beholden to it ." Pass it up the line to VCAT" is the implication and action that must be checked . VCAT is no place to stop things that should have been stopped a lot earlier . A court of law is no place to halt the train of indecision and difficult site driven questions that used to resolved with the help of bodies such as DSE . Anyone who has ever played with the law, knows it to be unreliable ; and VCAT on environment - very unreliable!

The best place to stop stupidity is on the ground, at the local level. Dick Win is no longer funding the most efficient planning process . The efficent process is a "Say no early and why" . Presumably the club would love all the decisionmaking to come to KINGS ST , so -----thats just how they fund it .

Labor has let the gaps develop at the local level, so that increasingly the decisions are about right proceddures , not about right practice . If you think its bad now, wait till all this duck shoving destroys VCAT and gives us what we definitely don't need - an even more expensive environment court ---like they have in NSW ! Maybe its fine for developers - they can afford those kind of procedures !