Page 431 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 22 March 2022
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Our services are centralised. We do not want our community travelling great distances across the territory to conduct everyday activities. We want our citizens to have a compact, efficient city. We need to have transit-oriented development so that households have the option of walking, riding and catching public transport to meet their daily needs. It is no good if we keep sprawling. We need more infill development and smarter, more efficient development, not endless urban sprawl.
In fact, the ACT Greens are great environmentalists, and that is why in our election platform we have actually called for more than that. We have called for 80 per cent of new development to be infill, not 70 per cent, because we want to protect our bush and our grasslands. We do not want to keep sprawling and sprawling, and destroying more and more of our habitat and our environment.
We have chosen to do this because we know it is so important that we protect critical environmental areas. It is part of our strategy to limit the ecological destruction that is being caused by endless unsustainable development. It is part of our strategy to make sure that we are protecting habitat and protecting our endangered species. Minister Vassarotti has listed a number of those endangered species and she has explained to us why it is really important that we protect this habitat.
It is not just for aesthetics. We know that Canberrans really value the bush capital; they really value our green spaces. But we need to protect these endemic areas. If we do not do it, they are gone. Once they are gone, you cannot bring them back. We need to protect these for our children and for our children’s children. We know that it is important to protect our environment, and that is why we know that we need a healthy environment. I moved a motion on that in a recent sitting, and I was happy that all of the parties here supported that motion. Sometimes it seems that we can get really good tripartisan agreement to protect our environment and to make sensible policy choices, but sometimes we seem incapable of having a mature conversation about it in here.
It is really important that we preserve a healthy environment and that we acknowledge that as a right. It is a right that human beings have access to a healthy environment. It is a right within its own right. We need to make sure that we are protecting this environment for the species, for the plants, for the animals and for future generations.
Our parks and bushland should not be taken for granted. If we want them to be here forever, we need to protect them right now. That is actually really important in a lot of the choices we are making, not merely on housing affordability but in our new planning system. We need to make sure that we are protecting our environment in that new planning system, and I was pleased to see that there are a lot of measures in the exposure draft that do just that.
It is also really important that we do not simply consider our greenfield land as empty land. We have heard a lot about the western edge. We have heard from a lot of people in this room about the western edge. Sometimes we have members of the same party on one day saying that we should bulldoze the western edge and release it, and on the next day we are told that we should protect the western edge and save precious areas like Bluetts Block.
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