Page 1000 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
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If we allow ourselves to run entirely on the basis of financial decisions, then of course we can see that we could well have a city akin to Hong Kong. We do not need that and we do not want that in Canberra. Other cities in the world struggle to protect their green spaces. London has a huge mass of green space, even within its boundaries, in spite of the density of that city. We must be prepared to have the same courage as the people of Britain had in protecting their green spaces.
I come finally to the other factor, which is transport. The more we look at our planning issues, the more we must take transport into consideration. As we need this planning legislation, we need to understand that when development gets out of hand in the centre of Civic we will have to pay infrastructure and transport costs.
Every time we decide to buy another new bus it costs us basically $100,000 a year. That sort of expense leads very, very rapidly to major budget problems. If we talk about increasing the number of people working in Civic and putting them on buses, we must take that into account. We must also take into account, if we are going to use cars as our method of transport, the cost of roads, traffic lights and roundabouts.
In the initial statement on the budget that we have had handed down I notice that one of the budget items is a roundabout that is costing millions of dollars. We must look further into that - $2.5m for a roundabout.
A member: It has been reduced from six.
MR MOORE: It has been reduced from $6m, terrific! The point is that we are very much in need of planning legislation to be put into place as quickly as it possibly can be.
One other final factor to which I would like to draw your attention is that the budget also suggests - and I will need to check this out further - that pay parking controls could, at a cost of $59,000, be introduced in Amaroo Street in Reid. I happen to know Amaroo Street - not that I live on it; I do not - which runs next to the Reid TAFE.
I would say that if the Government is considering putting parking meters into a suburban street for the first time in Canberra then it ought really to realise that it has its planning issues completely off the rails, because that would be totally and completely unacceptable to the people of inner Canberra. I assure you that that will be fought very, very drastically.
I hope that that has slipped somehow through an ACT Administration official into the budget by mistake, and I am sure that issue can be rectified. But it illustrates that we need our planning organised and we need to have a
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