News

Judge says to act on defamation allegations, The Industrtial Commission of NSW. August 17, 2010

THE Industrial Commission of NSW has recommended that Wagga Wagga Council take legal action for defamation over criticisms of its senior planners.

The deputy president of the commission, Justice John Grayson, said the council should seek legal advice as to whether the developer Peter Hurst and the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser had defamed a council employee.

“I recommend the general manager [Phil Pinyon] prepare a letter to the complainant, Mr Hurst, expressly rejecting the allegations made by the complainant in relation to personal gain, breaches of the code of conduct and alleged attempts to deceive by incorrectly reporting development applications,” Justice Grayson said.

The Development and Environmental Professionals Association brought the case after Mr Hurst had lodged a written complaint with the council and the Advertiser had run a series of articles about complaints by developers about the council.

A blog from a reader on the paper’s website described one planner as a “cancer”. Mr Hurst’s five-page letter made a series of allegations against two senior officers and called for their immediate suspension.

An independent audit found no basis for an allegation that staff had manipulated undetermined development application numbers for personal gain in the form of bonuses.

Justice Grayson said the council’s rebuttal of the allegations had not been reported by the local media, had not drawn any apology from the complainant and had the potential to inflict damage to the reputation and professional standing of people named in the complaint.

He said councils had a “significant obligation of duty of care” to protect employees. Mr Hurst should apologise to those named in his complaint and that apology should be published in the local media, he said.

A union secretary, Ian Robertson, said the commission’s decision was an important signal to developers and councils that they must respect the integrity of employees “doing the job the community expects them to do”.

Guidelines could kill off coastal building, Kelsey Munro and Matthew Moore. August 20, 2010.

THOUSANDS of NSW coastal development sites may never be built on under new government guidelines directing councils to limit construction on beachfront and lakeside land under threat from rising sea levels.

The NSW Coastal Planning Guidelines, released today, encourage councils to reject development and rezoning applications on land deemed at risk.

The guidelines define hazard areas and urge coastal councils to take a strategic, risk-based approach to plan for the impacts of climate change.

Homes in at-risk areas may need to be relocatable so they can be moved to higher ground.

Councils are strongly discouraged from intensifying development or rezoning land from rural to urban in high-risk areas ”unless the impacts of sea level rise can be effectively managed”.

Adaptation strategies could include structural protection works, but councils should prioritise ‘’soft engineering options” such as beach nourishment or re-establishing barrier dune systems over the construction of seawalls or sandbagging, which might redirect erosion if poorly designed, the document says.

The Minister for Planning, Tony Kelly, said: “It is vital to properly plan for sea level rise to ensure homes are not built too close to hazard areas.”

The guidelines cite flooding in coastal lakes and rivers as a key issue of concern.

Councils are to map hazard areas on the basis of the state government’s benchmarks for sea level rise, which anticipate a 40-centimetre rise by 2050 and 90 centimetres by 2100. Such rises would be associated with projected coastal erosion of between 45 to 90 metres, the guide says.

A NSW Planning spokesman said that while the guidelines were not statutory, similar documents were regularly used to inform land-use planning.

But it was not clear whether councils that disregard the guidelines could be held liable for allowing development on at-risk areas that in future were damaged by sea level rise.

”The department would prefer not to be giving legal advice on liability issues as it is not possible to pre-empt or predict the wide variety of circumstances in which these issues might arise,” he said.

Insurers have been pressuring governments to clarify where responsibility lies for damage associated with climate change.

The Insurance Council of Australia has not seen the guidelines, but a spokeswoman said: ”We welcome any initiative that provides greater clarity … in [coastal] risk management.”

The Sydney Coastal Councils Group welcomed the guidelines, which took into account 90 public submissions on a draft released in November.

The group’s spokesman, Craig Morrison, acknowledged restrictions on development in coastal areas could be controversial. ”We’d see the solution to that being the state government supporting councils in the implementation of the guidelines so they’re done consistently and appropriately throughout NSW.”

The Australian Coastal Society president and University of Sydney emeritus professor, Bruce Thom, welcomed the policy as the most advanced of its type in the country. ”It clarifies for council what they can do and can’t do.”

The policy will be reassessed if reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the CSIRO indicate changes to projected sea level rise.

From ghetto to grove, a housing success story, Louise Hall. April 29, 2010.

THE Gordon Estate in Dubbo had long been a ghetto of welfare dependency, hopelessness and crime when it gained national notoriety with an alcohol-fuelled riot on New Year’s Day 2006.

That night, scenes of up to 100 Aborigines attacking two detectives, setting fire to a police car and destroying houses forced the NSW government to initiate one of the most ambitious social policy changes in years. Continue reading

Population growing at twice global average, Jacob Saulwick. March 26, 2010.

AUSTRALIA’S population is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the world, after crashing through 22 million late last year.

A demographic report shows the population grew at 2.1 per cent in the year to the end of September, outstripping the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The world population grew 1.1 per cent in the same period. Continue reading