THE Property Council of Australia, Tasmanian Division and the Master Builders Association Tasmania (MBT) have joined forces to push the Tasmanian government to action to make the necessary changes to their planning agenda and implement a single residential planning development code.

"It you think we have too many politicians in Tasmania, all I would ask people to do is try and work your way through the planning schemes - there are 36," said Property Council Executive Director, Mary Massina."For the last four years, our three organizations have been calling for significant planning reform and it appears that it has fallen on deaf ears."

"The best the government can offer at the moment is another six to twelve month wait for the implementation of the single residency code - making it six years from commitment to potential implementation- that's ridiculous."

Massina said despite government claims of action on the three regional strategies and the issue being more complex than initially thought, there was no ongoing funding in the this year's budget to complete the strategies. "Instead what we saw was the Tasmanian Planning Commission's budget slashed by just under US$1 million because the strategies had been 'completed' when clearly they had not and this is backed by the Minister's Friday statement," she added.

MBT's Executive Director Michael Kerschbaum said the simple fact is without effective planning reform, investment in construction suffers."Tasmania needs investment, 30,000 Tasmanians rely on this sector and if the state is to cope with the changes that are occurring in other sectors, we need to maintain every job we can," he said.