Page 367 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 10 February 2021
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service employer having moved into the town centre. This is disappointing given that the original plan for Canberra focused on having town centres to support active communities where people would not have far to travel for everything they needed, a planning policy which has been supported by successive planning strategies both before and after self-government. Without that large anchor tenant, our town centre has not had the same head start that other town centres have benefited from and even continue to benefit from.
While we have seen some non-residential development come to the town centre, most of the development has been mixed use, with a strong ratio of residential to commercial. Continuing on this path, and without this anchor tenant, there is a feeling in the community that the balance between the residential uses and the non-residential uses in our town centre’s mixed-use development is not quite hitting the mark. This feeling is being compounded at present, as we are increasingly seeing buildings and proposals for buildings which focus on residential, with only small commercial offerings in more recently developed parts of the town centre.
If we are to fully realise the town centre as envisioned in the original intent and aspired to by the community, there needs to be a commercial approach to the development proposals in our town centre: a commercial lead where we know what economic activity we want to attract, we know what companies want to locate to our town centre, and we build rather than retrofit for this activity so that there is no reason for it not to come to our town centre.
The current approach and mechanisms in the planning space have not produced the outcomes that the community aspires to. While it will be argued by many that there is no demand for commercial in Gungahlin town centre at present, if we build the town centre based on current demand, without futureproofing, we will build out the opportunity in the future.
If we do not protect the public interest and development continues the way it is until all the space in the town centre is used up, we will end up with very little commercial space and almost exclusively retail and residential buildings in the town centre, with no opportunity to harness future demand that arises—not to mention that very few mixed-use developments done by private industry are reserving any space for community facilities.
A failure to intervene now because the market is not providing the results that we seek will lead to problems and poorer outcomes down the track for our community. The outcome that we are facing is in fundamental opposition to the planning intent. Given that the federal government is not helping the situation, we need to use the levers that we have to intervene.
That is what this motion is about. I would like to state for the record that mixed-use development has a lot of potential in what it can, as a built form, deliver to our community. Think of it this way. Under single-use land planning, when we set out to develop an area, we would have a mix of land uses or activities in a defined geographical area. Consider just about any suburb in Canberra. We would have residential; we would have commercial in the form of local shops; we would have a
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