Page 3888 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 30 November 2021
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Action 2 of this strategy is to make underused play spaces more available to the community for more play uses. Key focus areas for action 2 in this strategy are to strengthen and promote processes for establishing and managing social infrastructure on public land; work with stakeholders and communities to adapt underused green spaces into valuable community assets which support a diversity of play uses; and take a collaborative approach to identifying where school and public recreational open space and play facilities can be better aligned so that more facilities are available to the community as a key objective in relation to these spaces and their use.
These focus areas are directly aligned with the motion being considered today, further demonstrating the alignment of the government’s existing approach with the initiatives in this motion. And this strategy will, when finalised, provide a long-term strategic approach to the provision of better quality, more diverse, more accessible and more sustainable play spaces for the ACT community. I thank Ms Clay for bringing along this important motion today, and I am always happy to talk about what the ACT government is doing to ensure the delivery of quality open spaces that meet the needs of the communities and their expectations.
I go to the amendment that has been proposed by Mr Cain. I wonder what he has been saying to the community when community members raise concerns that they might have about the use of the ACT’s dryland ovals. I wonder whether he has suggested to members of the community that the ACT government might have—
Mr Cain: What are you saying, Minister?
MS BERRY: I am just asking whether Mr Cain has made the suggestion to people in our community that the government has an alternative plan of use for dryland ovals and whether he has implied to them that the ACT government might be considering future residential and commercial development on these dryland ovals, which, of course, is not the case. I encourage Mr Cain to ensure that the community understands that the ACT government places significant value on dryland ovals, and understands the value that our community places on them. The community has benefited from the generous and diverse provision of these urban open spaces, which have delivered a wide range of benefits to our community.
I will leave it there, but I thank again Ms Clay for bringing this motion to the Assembly today. It gives us the chance to clarify and understand the history behind these dryland open spaces and their uses, and the reasons their use was changed during the millennium drought. It looks at how the future use of our sport fields needs to be done in a sustainable way. Taking into account that we are in an environment which is facing continuous climate change, we need to make sure that we have sports fields, not just for now. We need to ensure that we can maintain them in a way which will enable all of our community to use them well into the future. So I commend Ms Clay’s motion and I thank her very much for bringing this subject to the Assembly for discussion today.
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella—Manager of Government Business, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Industrial Relations and Workplace Safety, Minister for
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