23 NOVEMBER HIGHLIGHTS

MAYORAL MINUTE QUEENSLAND COVID-19 ROADMAP
The first hour of the council meeting of November 23 was centred around discussion of a Mayoral minute concerning vaccination and vaccination mandates. It was very lengthy, and I don’t have the space to repeat it. It will be in the Council minutes online. In a nutshell it authorises the Mayor to make representations to the State to reassess several issues around the mandates that are concerning the community.
I successfully moved an amendment to the motion to also reinforce the most important message Council could send to the community, and that is to get vaccinated ASAP. The mayoral minute and amendment were supported unanimously.

APPEAL SETTLED TO APPROVE HEALTH CENTRE WITH SIX CABINS, CORNER LAHEY AND MAIN WESTERN ROADS
The previous council knocked this application back and the developer took it to court. After negotiating changes to conditions, Council has decided to approve it. This is a very concerning outcome for Tamborine Mountain and I believe Council should have maintained its position and followed through and defended its refusal.

It wasn’t so reticent to spend money going to court challenging the Heritage Council’s decision to list the pig and calf saleyards in Beaudesert, and my guess is that will cost much more than it may have cost to go to court to protect Tamborine Mountain from an inappropriate development.

What is also of great concern to me is that this decision was taken in closed session and so the debate on this issue and the reasons will be hidden from the public. I can’t tell you anything about it and the media can’t report on it. Last year the Local Government Act was amended so that planning issues could not be discussed in closed session. It does allow closure of meetings to hear legal opinion. Council heard the legal opinion weeks prior to the council meeting but by repeating the legal advice in the planning report on this matter (when I considered it could have easily been excluded from the report) denied the public its right to know how and why this planning decision was made and how they were represented by their councillors.

We have a real issue of transparency here and the way this was structured gets around the requirement that deliberation of planning issues can’t be hidden from the public and is untenable in my view. The public and those who are affected by planning decisions have a right to know how decisions are made.
Of course, the other downfall of transparency is excessively delegating planning issues to council officers to decide.
Councillor McConnell and I voted against the motion to settle the appeal.

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SCENIC RIM REGIONAL PROSPERITY LEADERSHIP ALLIANCE
My understanding is that this is a new super economic development and growth advisory committee that has a huge cast of members from Government departments, agencies and organisations, business and not-for-profit organisations formed out of other existing committees, to represent the interests and needs of the future growth and development of the Scenic Rim. All the details are included in council agenda item 10.5. The Mayor will be the chair for the first 12 months and Deborah Howe, General Manager Customer and Regional Prosperity, will be the permanent Executive Officer. Its roles and functions are in the report and notes the drivers of economic growth as:
·        Agri Business
·        Tourism – (Includes Agri Tourism)
·        Creative industries and business development services
·        Health and wellbeing
·        Waste to value
·        Transport and logistics
·        Large scale industry. Bromelton State Development area (large scale, high impact and difficult locate industries
·        Education and Workforce Development.
Not all members will have voting rights.
There are a lot of risks for such a large all-encompassing committee. Resourcing, grant funding and focus must be a big one. Will there be sectors that are winners and losers?
In order that some transparency exists I successfully requested an amendment to see that all councillors could attend these meetings, which will be held four times per year.

ARE MINOR AND OTHER CHANGE VARIATIONS CIRCUMVENTING OUR PLANNING DECISIONS?
Council’s abolition of a planning committee in mid-2020 is proving problematic. It was always the danger there would be issues when the majority of development decision making is delegated to unelected council officers or left to them giving verbal briefings to councillors in closed workshops, on a question-and-answer basis.
The problems now seem to have escalated to a more serious level. Once a planning decision is made, council officers can and are signing off on “change” and “minor change” applications, that may disregard or fail to understand the impacts and implications of such changes on submitters and others impacted by the development. In short, it gets around the Planning Scheme. In a case in the Planning and Environment Court recently a judge was scathingly critical of the use of Minor Change applications because she said in this case it “circumvented” the planning scheme. I have seen many examples of this locally and the problem needs addressing.

I remember a decade ago the very first Scenic Rim Council officers used their delegations to approve a series of “minor change” applications to advance an inappropriate development that would have been a disaster for the Mountain. It was called the Hyacinth case. Of course, it really was not minor at all, but Council stuck to their guns, went to court to try to defeat the Progress Association’s action to stop it. The council spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs and still claimed it was minor and lawful till the end. The result was a complete loss for the council with the judge dismissing all approval decisions made on the land and saying the council’s actions were “reprehensible and incomprehensible”.

I have lodged a NOTICE OF MOTION for next week’s Ordinary Meeting to address the issue of how changes to already approved developments occur. I believe that all these change delegations should be reviewed, and the decision-making given back to the elected councillors to decide in meetings open to the public and media. How else in a democracy do you achieve the best outcomes, protect the rights of individuals and persons impacted by development decisions and guard against corruption and undue influence?

Derek Swanborough
Councillor Division 1
derek.s@scenicrim.qld.gov.au
Ph 0436 351 567