THE Doreen Residents Action Group is alarmed at proposed fee hikes at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal after it spent thousands of dollars to fight a high-rise development at the tribunal last year.
Group spokeswoman Lisa Lawrence said the group hired a barrister and won the case against a five-storey development in Laurimar, but VCAT fee increases could stop ordinary people from taking action.
She said the tribunal’s proposal to increase “commencement fees” from $38 to $502 and possibly $1007 by 2015 would take “more than a couple of sausage sizzles” to fund for community groups.
Ms Lawrence said if a council rejected a proposal, it should be the applicant, not the council or ratepayers opposing it, who should pay the majority of the VCAT costs.
Whittlesea council’s planning and major projects acting director Maria Cooke, said VCAT had released its proposed fee structure and invited submissions by February 15. She said the council would review the fee structure and decide whether to make a submission.
Under the fee proposal, it will be 25 times more expensive to initiate an action. Hearing fees including mediation, which is a free service often used to resolve a dispute without going to a hearing, would be charged on the likely number of days a case is expected to run.
The daily rate, additional to the commencement fee, for hearings of normal cases would begin at $368.40 for days two to four, and go up to $1028.70 for day 10 and any day afterwards.
Complex cases would cost $1834 and those on the major case list would cost $3226 a day. Melbourne metropolitan councils dealt with 37,325 planning applications last financial year, 3011 were reviewed at VCAT according to the Department of Planning and Community Development’s annual report.
Fees for many of the cases VCAT hears would increase to recover 45 per cent of the cost of running the tribunal, or $22 million a year.
Municipal Association of Victoria president Bill McArthur said the new fees were a reaction to a planning system that was past due for review. “These fees were set in 2000 and certainly don’t reflect current practices.”
The move to a user-pays system is a blow to the public’s access to justice, said shadow attorney-general Martin Pakula. “If you massively increase the fees as the government is proposing to do, many Victorians will simply not be able to utilise that court system.”
