Page 1981 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2022

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make sure that we are protecting green spaces and trees offsetting heat islands. We need to make sure that we understand urban planning matters, because with our urban planning tools we can either contribute to climate change or we can help adapt to climate change. We can make it worse, or we can make our lives a lot better.

Previous Liberal senator Zed Seselja made an announcement about this site in March. I note that he is not part of this ACT government, and he will very soon not be part of any government. He is not in a position to make planning decisions for our government or community, and he is certainly not making good choices for the climate. That announcement noted the potential of this site for housing. It identified around 240 hectares of land that might be suitable for development without legislative change, which could result in around 2,000 new dwellings or housing for around 4,500 people.

I also stop and note here that at the Evatt Primary School polling booth last month the Liberal Party primary vote went down by 8.4 per cent; in the Giralang booth it went down by 7.8 per cent; and in the division for Fenner it went down by 17.3 per cent. Most of these residents probably live around this site. I cannot tell you why they voted the way they did, but I think it is really important we note that they did vote that way in the context of a campaign about this site. That is just another signal that we need to make sure that we do that careful community consultation here. It simply has not yet been done.

Of course, we need more housing, and we certainly need more affordable housing. We all understand that in here. We have talked about it a lot, and it is really important. More housing may well be what Canberra decides to do with this site, irrespective of who owns it. Whether or not we do that, let’s remember all the options we have to make new housing. We can fund more public and social housing. We can help out our community housing sector with land and support. We can look at places within our existing footprint that can accommodate more dwellings than they currently accommodate. We can look at our vacancy rates and find out if we have empty homes right now, today, already built that could and should be occupied. We can influence our newly elected federal government to change the tax and policy settings that make it easier to own your seventh home than it is to own your first. We are quite likely to need to do all of these things. We need to do them in a smart, systematic and consultative way.

Ms Lee’s motion is not a quick fix to any immediate housing problems. It will take at least five years to build any new home from this. Some of the ideas I mentioned above could deliver much faster results, and that is why we need to be looking at all the tools we have to deal with this. The problems of climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss and the problems of human housing are really complex, and our solutions will be complex. We need a whole raft of measures.

I was really pleased to work with Minister Berry on her amendments to Ms Lee’s motion. I believe they will deliver some smart planning and housing options in a way that does not make climate change worse, that does not contribute to our environmental destruction and that makes sure we have the correct planning and consultation processes in there along the way.


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