Ms Anne Graham:

That is a hard question and better minds than mine have tried to put forward proposals in that regard. One thing that might assist the country in the future is to get to a point where there is much more balance in terms of projects going through the planning process, rather than having them arrive in bunches which causes resource issues for all the different agencies involved. I am thinking about the planning processes for MetroLink, DART+ and BusConnects, which are all coming into the planning process at the same time. That is just unfortunate and the way it has happened, whereas if they were scheduled and we had a great deal more pre-planning in terms of our capital investment, we could time them so that between our roads projects and all our major infrastructure projects they are more balanced as they are coming through the planning process. That is not always achievable because consultation can bring up issues that might delay projects, but something that may be considered in the future is to try to have a pipeline of projects across our infrastructure that comes to both the planning process and the legal process, if that is necessary, in a much more streamlined fashion. That is the only view I can offer.

The other point is to try to do as much pre-consultation as possible. It will not necessarily result in no judicial review process, but if many of the issues can be raised in the public domain as early as possible in the process, it should lead, one would hope, to a much more streamlined process coming into the planning process. However, there is no guarantee of that.