Land use planning
The question of land use planning is exempliWed by the highly visible public relations battle that took place in 2002 between The Village Building Company, the developer wishing to build a major housing estate at Tralee, and Can- berra International Airport, which wants the land kept free from residential development as part of its proposed “high noise corridor”.
This proposed high noise corridor, where the jet Xight path tracks are most heavily concentrated, runs in a north- south direction between designated noise abatement areas (Fig. 2). The land developers argue that the location of the proposed development is well within the Australian Stan- dard (AS2021) for land use planning, even for the airport’s projections for air traYc in the year 2050. That is, the pro- posed development does not lie within the so-called 20 ANEF noise contour, a measure designed for land use planning to stop airports being “built out” by noise sensi- tive land uses (Department of Transport and Regional Ser- vices, 2000, p. 1; The Village Building Co., 2003). However, experience in recent years demonstrates that the aircraft noise problem is not conWned to areas inside the noise con- tours. In fact most complaints about aircraft noise at Aus- tralian airports come from people who live outside the published 20 ANEF contours (Department of Transport and Regional Services, 2000, p. 2). For this reason, Can- berra airport management argues that the ANEF system is