COFA + UNSW indifferent to students and a bully says MP

NSW Parliament, 21 April 2010

Ms SYLVIA HALE [9.24 p.m.]: 
"Part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act is notorious. It allows the Minister for Planning to usurp a council's powers to determine developments in a council's area if the Minister decrees that the project is a major development or a development of State significance. Part 3A has allowed the Government to ruthlessly approve development applications that are totally opposed by the communities most affected by them. Needless to say, the chances of obtaining approval are infinitely greater if the applicant is a donor to the Australian Labor Party.

"The following are two examples of how part 3A is being used to ride roughshod over community concerns, environmental issues and the fundamentals of any democratic process. The first is the redevelopment of the College of Fine Arts site in Paddington by the University of New South Wales. No-one denies that existing conditions for staff and students are intolerable and that the site needs to be redeveloped. What is unacceptable, however, is the approval process. One of the main concerns voiced by local residents is that construction will take more than two years to complete.

"During that time, trucks will remove debris from the site and bring in building materials. Despite not being the approval authority, Sydney City Council was able to broker a compromise agreement between Paddington residents and the university about the streets that trucks would use during construction works and the times that trucks would use them. These negotiations were conducted in good faith, or so the local residents thought, and the university agreed that Greens Road rather than Napier, Selwyn and Albion streets would be used for truck access to minimise the impact on local residents' lives and amenity.

"But despite this apparent agreement, the university has now turned its back on the community and has applied to the Minister for Planning to modify about one-third of the conditions of the part 3A approval to allow it to use Napier, Selwyn, and Albion streets for truck access, despite Greens Road being the most suitable route. Clearly, the university does not give a toss about the Paddington community. It is prepared to ignore both residents and the elected council and go to the Government for permission to bully its way through residential streets. It also appears that the university is indifferent to its students, who are not to be relocated during the redevelopment. Surely for occupational health and safety reasons alone it is not desirable for students to be present on a very confined site while major building works are in progress, especially when a nearby vacant educational building is available to accommodate them."

The full (Hansard) transcript is available here