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.

UNSW mismanagement, well and truly trucked.

From humiliating financial bungling and loss of face in its failed Asian campus venture to a mortifying police probe into cadaver abuse at its medical school, the past three years have seen UNSW make headlines for all the wrong reasons.

In 2007, some months after the macabre cadaver scandal erupted, the university was forced to make an embarrassing public apology to relatives of people whose donated bodies were allegedly inappropriately handled, sexually interfered with, and fondled by trainee surgeons.