Mr. Robin Mandal:

Therein lies the solution. If we have good development plans that are not torn up at every opportunity by central government, our planning system would work because we would all know what to expect - the applicant, the citizen, the development, the authority, the Government and the State. We would all know. That is what we are looking for. The concern I have is that in terms of that being the rule book, it has to have a certain flexibility. It has to allow for certain central government intervention. It has to have a degree of flexibility but the development plan should be the core decision-making system. Everything else should be subsidiary to it.

Going back to Senator Fitzpatrick's point, one of the challenges is getting that public engagement at development plan-making time. That is a real challenge but that is where the solutions are and therein doing all the hard work up front at the development plan stage and not throwing floodgates of alternative decision making open to applicants and their teams of advisers.