Page 3279 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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coordinate a response to restore and respect those heritage buildings because there are multiple owners. Buildings are unit titled. There are more than 60 owners so there needs to be a government agency to coordinate those activities, and also to coordinate the other government agencies that own assets in the precinct. For example, Icon Water in relation to the stormwater infrastructure and Transport Canberra and City Services in relation to the public realm.
The City Renewal Authority has an element of its activities that relates to the use of the levy you referred to multiple times, Mr Cain. That levy collects $2.35 million, rising to about $2.5 million in the final out year. Let us be clear: that $2.5 million is not going to be able to address every single infrastructure challenge within a 100-year-old precinct. It is not intended to, Mr Cain. But there are urgent works and they have been carried out by the authority.
I make the point ultimately, and I appreciate that this city and its planning structure has multiple town centres. But the city is for every Canberran. Not just the people who live here. Although I note that its population is doubling and one of the fastest growing areas of Canberra is this central precinct. That is a deliberate policy strategy. Lots of new residents, lots of demand on ageing infrastructure. The CBD is for everyone. I guess there is a question here about what sort of Canberra do we want? Are we five or six communities 80,000 strong who just happen to live next to each other? Or are we the city of Canberra where we are all part of a community? Our political structure leans much more towards that we just happen to be five towns that are co-located next to each other. But we literally adjoin. Our city itself, at 455,000 people, and our economy, is only so big. So if we do not unify as a city, then we are not in a position to attract the sort of investment and infrastructure that a city approaching half a million people would expect. One of the challenges is that there are certain assets that our city is only big enough to have one of. The question then is, in order to have access to that single piece of infrastructure equitably distributed, it is logical, as is the case in pretty much every city where there is only one of them, for it to be located in the centre of the city. Canberra bucks that trend in some instances in that we have a more distributed network of large scale infrastructure. That is an historic planning decision.
It has an interesting application in the context of stadium infrastructure that Mr Cain referenced in his remarks. It is certainly the case that we have pursued the concept of a new stadium in the CBD. We have looked at all of the possibilities and how you might be able to deliver that project. But it is not feasible. It cannot deliver the project you would expect for the cost on the site that was identified without undertaking a very expensive relocation of a road. We have tried. But it does not work. So I acknowledge it does not work and that was my answer to Mr Cain’s question. But throughout the process it was not the only option we were looking at. That has been very clear along the journey of consideration and in looking at alternative sites. So we have always had other options. We have now reached the point where we can categorically say that it will not work on the city site, so we are now focusing our attention on those alternative options.
But, of course, there are other infrastructure projects within the forward infrastructure plan that would work on the site. As part of precinct renewal and of the development of new infrastructure for which there is likely to be only one such facility in the entire
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