Save Our Suburbs (Vic)

21/3/07 Justice Stuart Morris, head of VCAT, has resigned!

The recent resignation of former VCAT head Justice Stuart Morris is in many ways welcome news. Although he has introduced procedural reforms at VCAT, the nature of the planning tribunal and its decisions under his leadership have continued to garner increasing criticism from the community and councils across Melbourne .

We trust that his successor will encourage the State Government to review the way VCAT functions because the role of VCAT is fundamentally flawed.

It acts as a central planning authority, independently deciding planning applications from scratch. There is no appeal of VCAT decisions and the consistency of decisions can vary considerably, depending on which Member hears the case.

This is not justice, nor is it in the interests of sound urban planning for a city under pressure from population growth, climate change and the hydrocarbon fuel crisis.

Any formally adopted local policy changes to planning schemes should be given priority by VCAT. Otherwise these policies and the effort that goes into developing them are a complete waste of time and the present "ambit claim" nature of the less scrupulous development applications is just perpetuated. It is these controversial applications that are clogging the planning pipeline, encouraged by legal loopholes and the discretionary nature of the assessment process.

Therefore the role of VCAT must change to that of process review only, an oversight function for councils - ie, deciding only whether Councils act properly and follow their own processes fully and correctly. VCAT should not continue to play the role of a duplicate (and inconsistent) planning assessment authority.

SOS is diametrically opposed to this current role of VCAT as so clearly reflected in the directions judgment of Helen Gibson in P3043/2004, where she stated: “ The applicant seeks directions that the Council provide copies of the internal memoranda prepared by Council's urban designer and traffic engineer to assist in preparing his submission… (but) the Tribunal's role is not to review the decision making process of the Council… ”.

If VCAT instead exercised an oversight function over the Council decision-making process, Councils would be under constant public pressure to improve their performance. At the moment, there is very little accountability.