The Noosa Plan – is it black and white?

“Do you swear to protect the Noosa Plan, the whole Noosa Plan, and nothing but the Noosa Plan?”

“I do.”

In the run-up to the March Noosa Council elections some advocacy groups put candidates on the spot about their commitment to the Noosa Plan.

According to what was simplistic black and white thinking, there is only one right answer and one right approach to development assessment.  The Noosa Plan must be strictly adhered to at all costs.

As the questioners intended, the answers came back as a unanimous chorus of earnest ‘yesses’, presumably written with one hand on the heart and the other on the Noosa Plan.

Some candidates used “Protecting the Noosa Plan” as a vote-catching mantra.

One in hyperbolic mood went as far as to state: “Keep out those candidates who would go through the New Noosa Plan like a virus”.  It was the type of straw man technique that misrepresents opponents to gain advantage.

And the disinformation almost went further than that.

The previous president of OSCAR (the Organisation Sunshine Coast Association of Residents) divulged he was thinking of publishing a league table showing how many times each councillor voted against staff recommended development assessments.

It was as if councillors themselves had no right to independent judgement.

The OSCAR man’s rationale was that town planning schemes should be treated as sacred.  The intent was to out incumbent councillors who had not supported a 14-year old planning scheme each and every time.

In the end the league table never materialised. One reason might have been that, before September 2019, Noosa Council minutes did not record how individual councillors voted, so a Noosa Council league table was not even a possibility.

It may be that councillors who simply support every staff recommendation are actually those who are less capable of complex analysis or those who share the same ideological bias as staff or those who simply don’t do their own research or reading.

So the league table might have shone a light on incapacity rather than infidelity.

Why this almost religious emphasis on precisely aligning with the Noosa Plan every single time?

The former mayor often repeated an uncorroborated claim that a judge had once said that Noosa Council not straying from the Noosa Plan gave the court the ability to uphold the planning scheme’s standards.

Whether this happened or not, such assertions of almost biblical reverence reflected black and white thinking – virtually a proposition of good vs evil.

The former mayor and CEO frequently boasted that Noosa Council had won every appeal it ever defended.

Well, that really turned around how you define “won”.

On one occasion, in response to my request for further information, a manager presented a report detailing the results of all appeals since March 2016.

Of 34 appeals to the Planning and Environment Court, seven proceeded to trial and, yes, Council did win each of those seven.

But 17 were resolved during the preliminary mediation phase and 10 were withdrawn by the applicants.  Yet these were all referred to as council winning.

In truth mediated outcomes usually involve give and take on both sides and are in no way evidence of 100% wins. That’s mere vanity.

There can be good reasons for not proceeding in total alignment with the Noosa Plan. This is recognised in planning legislation which allows applications for ‘material change of use’, in other words approving a deviation from a use specified in the planning scheme.

There are also occasions when it may make sense to override a plan to achieve outcomes that are best for community, economy or environment.

How can a plan, often prepared years before the decision, get it right all the time, in every instance?  It clearly cannot. There are changing situations, changing needs, changing laws, changing community expectations…. so many factors that need to be taken into account.

The lack of congruence between a planning scheme and the needs of a community becomes greater as the planning scheme ages.

Queensland planning schemes are intended to have a 10-year timeframe.  So the 2006 Noosa Plan, which should have been replaced in 2016, was still in operation in 2020 – 14 years after it was approved.

This 2006 Noosa Plan moved through dynamically changing circumstances – from boom times, through the global financial crises and recovery and now the coronavirus – and required good judgement not just slavish conformity when it came to development assessment decisions.

No black and white application of potentially out-dated thinking could suffice. More mature consideration than that was always required. In some cases a vote for strict adherence to the plan might have been a very wrong decision.

The approach of total conformity also ignored the intent of the Planning Act that planning schemes to be performance based.

This means that development assessments must be outcome focused, not just rule bound.

The planning scheme is there to define desired outcomes and provide examples of how these might be achieved.  The legislative intent is not simply to apply a rigid, one size fits all approach.

It also needs to be considered that planning schemes are inevitably politicised; they fall short of pure objectivity.

Community consultation processes do not of themselves guarantee that community views are catered for. They are frequently cherry picked or even disregarded altogether.

The fine balance between community, economy and environment can be skewed in a planning scheme due to political ideology of councillors and council staff. Such biases are unlikely to operate in the community interest.

Councillors who do a sincere job of representing residents’ interests – and that’s what they are elected to do – need to be wary of such potential biases and courageous enough to rise above them.

If Council were there to always endorse staff recommendations, Council would in effect be merely a rubber stamp. In that case there would really be no point in having a council at all. The staff could do the job perfectly well without all those pesky meetings.

But in reality, under legislation Council is the ultimate authority as the local government, and councillors can and should exercise discretion in decision-making, taking into consideration context, extenuating circumstances and the needs of the community.

At local government council meetings, the Council should be oversighting the performance of the organisation and making decisions strategically, not just accepting staff recommendations or statements of slavish conformity with the planning scheme.

It cannot be assumed that what staff recommend always represents the best outcome for the community. It is the role of staff to provide advice on the basis of research and analysis. It is up to Council to assess strategic viability and community need and acceptability.

Work in any organisation involves differing levels of complexity. Role complexity may range from low (carrying out today’s work on the basis of a full set of instructions) to high (defining organisational mission, vision and strategy for the next 10 to 20 years in light of changing economic, political, legal, social, technological parameters).

The Planning Act caters for this by providing different development assessment processes for different levels of complexity, ranging from developments that are simply exempt, through self-assessable or code assessable, all the way to complex impact assessable changes of use.

Only the most complex or most controversial development applications come to Council for decision. A high percentage are either self-assessed, assessed by certifiers or assessed by council staff.

Council is like a board in its local government decision-making capacity.  It should be operating at the upper, more strategic levels of complexity.  And so it is with decisions about development assessment and the planning scheme.

It is up to staff to come up with case by case recommendations in light of the planning scheme and state regulations. It is up to Council to exercise judgement, taking into account the full context and implications.

It’s not just yes or no, good or bad.  It’s a complicated decision-making process. The outcomes should be ebony and ivory in harmony, not black and white in conflict.