Page 1192 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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MR WOOD (3.34): Mr Deputy Speaker, I find that the heart of our city, to mix my terms a little, has no soul. It is appropriate that in Heritage Week we should consider the heart of our city. We should examine what it is that we have been left with, which is the responsibility of none of us, although what we might be leaving for future generations is. Civic's building heritage has a script like a soap opera. It is actually a cultural and, I believe, an environmental tragedy. The protagonists in the drama have been numerous designers and bureaucrats and the audience, the people of Canberra, have had very little interaction with the actors, directors or producers. The result of that planning has been that there is too little interaction now between the people who use Civic and the Civic area itself.
With few exceptions, the buildings that mark the Civic of the late 1980s in particular, but a longer period in general, are hollow and featureless monuments to money. They represent the worst features of our instant society. They are rather like fast food: they have offered us quick gratification but very little ultimate physical benefit.
Heritage Week is the usual time to reflect about our distant past, to examine what we still have and to reflect upon our cultural heritage. Heritage Week should also be a time to project our thoughts to the immediate past and the foreseeable future and contemplate what heritage will be left for the next generation. What will mark the 1980s many years down the track? Very little, I would think.
Historically, this is the first time the Legislative Assembly has been in existence during Heritage Week. So today is an appropriate time to contemplate whether this chamber will pass the heritage test that will be set by future generations of Canberrans. Unfortunately, we have only to examine our very immediate environment to see, in this era of disposable office accommodation, that by 2010 there will be very little left of the buildings synonymous with our time in this parliament. I project that the only thing that will remain will be some photographic and written evidence of this Assembly, and I have to say that nothing else deserves to remain - in the sense of the buildings, might I say.
If we tolerate the development of more heartless concrete towers like this one that we sit in, then we as legislators will most certainly fail the heritage test of future generations. The few buildings that will be left standing in 20 or 30 years' time will be tacky, plastic, sterile monuments to our lack of architectural and social vision. No-one here has responsibility for the past, but we will be accountable in the future. As legislators we have the capacity to stop the cavern that is Civic. We have more than the capacity; we have the duty to make sure that there will be some human reminders that humans were in this parliament.
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