19 August 2010

Politicsweb - What is the DA covering up? - Top stories

What is the DA covering up?
Max Ozinsky
18 August 2010

Max Ozinsky asks why WCape MEC is not coming clean on planning applications

Three weeks ago the provincial parliament standing committee visited Pringle Bay and Betty's Bay, where we saw the disastrous effects of bad planning legislation and decisions, which have the potential to cause hundreds of millions of rands of losses to home owners and the Overstrand municipality.

We saw sand covering up houses which were built on shifting sand dunes on the beach. One house at Betty's Bay has already been demolished because it was eaten by a dune. Many others are under threat and remedial action will cost millions of rands and place a severe stress on the human and natural resources of the municipality.

One has to ask who gave permission for these houses to be built and why? Clearly unscrupulous developers made a lot of money. But in most cases the permission was granted by some level of government, under bad planning legislation, which in all likelihood was unconstitutional.

What is even stranger is that the DA government has now decided to prolong this situation for the next three years. The province will continue to use the Land Use Planning Ordinance (LUPO), a key piece of apartheid planning legislation first promulgated in 1985 and which is widely considered to be unconstitutional, whilst it writes new legislation. All this whilst the provincial parliament has already passed the Western Cape Planning and Development Act of 1999 (PDA) which can immediately be used as a basis to address these issues.

In a number of resolutions of the past years the provincial parliament has made it clear to the Department of Environmental Affairs and Planning that any extension to LUPO should be for as short a period as possible, due to its unconstitutionality. Previously the department asked for a three year extension to LUPO, but was only granted one year after a debate in which all parties expressed their concern on on the unconstitutional nature of what they were being asked to condone.

The reason that LUPO is unconstitutional is because it empowers the provincial government to take decisions that the constitution says must be taken by municipalities. When Premier Zille was mayor, she and the DA claimed to be great defenders of the constitution and the rights of local government. Today they are knowingly prolonging this illegal situation.

Continuing to use a law that is patently unconstitutional makes the Provincial Government liable to court action on claims it knows it will lose. This is demonstrates a further recklessness with regard to public finances.

DA MEC Anton Bredell is the latest in a long line of MECs who have been convinced by the department to keep LUPO in place and to defy the Provincial Parliament by not implementing the Planning and Development Act (PDA) it passed in 1999. This is in spite of the fact that when the DA was previously in power, the standing committee held many long meetings to consider the regulations for the Act, which would guide local government in their decision making.

In trying to understand why he had taken this decision I asked the MEC in a parliamentary question for written reply, to list all the planning applications currently being considered by his department. This information should be readily available from the normal management controls of the department.

Instead of providing this information which is basic to my role of oversight as an MPL, the MEC refused to answer the question, even though he is obliged to do so under the rules of the provincial parliament and the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

I was even more shocked when a part, but not all, of this information was published in the newspapers as a paid advert by the department. In other words the MEC of an "open opportunity" government refuses to answer parliamentary questions, but then grandstands in a misleading way in the press, wasting taxpayer's money.

When I then asked an interpellation as to why the MEC refused to answer my question for written reply, DA Speaker Sheikh Esau, without communicating with me, removed my interpellation from the question paper.

Clearly the DA are covering something up. Why don't they want the public to know which planning applications they are considering? Perhaps this is why they want another three years to unconstitutionally take decisions they have no right to take?

To rewrite a law that already is passed in this manner is a scandalous waste of taxpayer's money. If there are parts of the PDA which require changes, these could be quickly dealt with by the provincial parliament without wasting more taxpayer's money on consultants for the next three years.

When the consultant hired by the department, Professor De Visser of UWC, made a presentation to the standing committee, it was clear that he had not even been told by the department that the PDA existed! Why when spending public money would they hide and try to avoid a law which has been passed by the legislature?

Before the legislature considered the draft regulations for the PDA there was extensive work-shopping of the proposals with municipalities, paid for out of the budget of the department. Only the City of Cape Town, then under ANC control, made comments and objections and the regulations were then amended to take these issues into account. As the Act and the regulations were written with their constitutionality upper most in the minds of the legislature, there should not be too many amendments necessary today.

The DA and its MEC have been in power for more than a year now. One would think given all their hype, they would open and transparent on these issues. Instead we are seeing a smokescreen being drawn by the DA over the future of planning and spatial development in the province. Given the past and current performance of the department this can only have disastrous consequences for that time in the future when it will be too late to stop the dunes.

Max Ozinsky is an ANC member of the Western Cape Provincial legislature. This article first appeared in the Cape Argus.

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