Good news! Thanks to requests from WA Councils and Councillors WALGA have decided to extend the closing date for reports from Councils on their discussion paper about Third Party Appeal Rights in Planning to the 20th of July.
We believe the item will be debated publicly by the City of Stirling Council at the next Planning and Development Committee meeting on the 20th of June at 6PM. Their recommendations could then be debated and possibly resolved at the following full (‘Ordinary’) Council meeting on the 4th of July at 7PM. Keep an eye on the agendas.
See our recent blog post alerting Stirling residents that the City of Stirling was preparing a report behind closed doors and we asked members of the community to email City of Stirling Councillors and let them know that we do want the right to be able to appeal against planning decisions that may negatively impact on us and communities and that we want the matter to be discussed publicly.
More Information
Currently in Western Australia, a developer may appeal against refusal of planning permission or on a condition of the approval that they don’t like, but members of the public have no right to appeal against approval decisions – no matter how strong their case.
Below is a transcript from a speech by retired planning lawyer Councillor Sandra Boulter from the Town of Cottesloe at public meeting in 2016 about increasingly controversial DAPs, which helps explain the issue;
“There is no legal nexus between planning and the way we do development [in WA].
People come to WA and say what is wrong with your planning system?
We’ve got great planners and planning policies [Local Government planning schemes and policies etc.], but there is no connection with the development approval system”.
The only way, to make the legal nexus between planning and development approval is with third party appeal rights.
A third party is someone other than the two parties involved. The two parties involved are the applicant [developer] and the decision maker, everyone else is a third party … a third party is an affected person who is not part of the process.
There are no Merits Appeal Rights in Western Australia against an approval [when a decision is inconsistent with the requirements of an application, but not actually illegal]. This is inconsistent with every planning document that we have developed to guide that development.
If DAP approves something that is prohibited [illegal], the decision can be taken to the Supreme Court for judicial review. However, this is the most costly, most complicated, most complex legal proceeding that you can just about imagine. But we have that.”
So a Merits Review can go to the State Administrative Tribunal, but only developers have got a refusal [the right to appeal] on conditions that they don’t like. We as third parties can’t go to SAT and argue that something may be in breach of our Local Structure Plan or our Development Plan or our Strategic Planning Document or our Planning Policy or our Beach and Foreshore Policy and ask for it to be reviewed.
These are bad decisions; they are undemocratic because the rule of law says it should be equal for everybody, it isn’t equal.”
“We will never get legislative change to our Planning & Development Act until we stop donations to political parties from property and road developers.”
“Until we change the Planning & Development Act and connect planning with development we will never fix this problem.”
