GREENS HERITAGE POLICY

LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL

Thursday 7 May 2009

Ms SYLVIA HALE [5.28 p.m.]: Recently I attended a National Trust function at which the planning Minister, the shadow planning Minister and I were asked to outline our parties' views on heritage. During my speech I detailed the variety of ways the Labor Government has undermined heritage protections. Tonight I will outline what the Greens propose in relation to heritage policy.

The Greens vision is to put in place a heritage system, the prime objective of which is to accept and meet the responsibility that we have to future generations to protect and hand on to them the natural, built and cultural treasures left to us by our forebears. Creating such a system requires a number of steps. First, the time has come to genuinely reform the planning system so that development decisions are made on the basis of the public interest, not on who made the biggest payment to the ruling party. Accordingly, the Greens continue to call for the banning of political parties or candidates accepting donations from the property development industry. The Greens have put our policy principles into practice for many years by refusing to accept donations from the property development or any other industry. But a voluntary policy is not enough.

Refusing to accept corporate donations should be mandatory and should apply to all parties and politicians at all levels of government. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, on each of the three occasions that the Greens have moved in this Parliament for such a ban, Labor and Opposition parties have combined to defeat it, despite their stated commitments to banning donations. However, the Greens will put up the proposal again and again until Labor and Liberal vote in line with their rhetoric. Secondly, we believe it is time to recognise that the community values its heritage and its environment more than it values the profits to be made from unrestrained development. Accordingly we will push for a clear and publicly supported set of heritage rules that are impartially and uniformly enforced, rather than the current mess of multi-layered rules that can be overridden at will by Ministers and bureaucrats and are more often breached than observed.

To give effect to these rules the Greens will continue to pursue the repeal of part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act and the limiting or removal of the powers of the State Government to override environmental and heritage protections in order to approve large projects that breach existing planning rules. Thirdly, we will pursue changes to the housing and the exempt and complying development codes to ensure that proper assessment is made of the heritage significance of a site before it can be destroyed. Fourthly, the Heritage Office must be adequately funded and resourced and again be made independent of the Department of Planning. We support the Opposition's recent proposal for a Minister for Heritage to be appointed and for that position to sit within the Environment portfolio.