Page 3637 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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neighbourhood, its planning principles, and all of the inherent advantages because it happens to be going through its lowest time. It is a normal and expected part of the cycle.
One of the best ways of assessing the impact of removing a primary school from a neighbourhood is to assess the decline of places like Downer and Page and other suburbs where schools have been closed. In the case of Downer, it is becoming more and more apparent that the shops are no longer viable. Ironically, the aged persons units recently built next to the shops meet the regulation of being within a specified distance of shops, but they will fail the criterion shortly by default, because there will not be any shops there.
Mr Duby: Whose fault is that? You want the people at Tuggeranong to subsidise the people at Downer. That is what you want.
MR MOORE: No, but we expect you to learn from the mistakes. How much worse for you to repeat the mistakes of those people, when you can see the results of the mistakes. As you know, I have the same attitude to them that I do to you.
The school has been removed, parents now pick up their children from Majura Primary next to the Watson shops, and do their shopping there. The planning issues and the idea of an integrated neighbourhood cannot be lightly dismissed. The system of planning makes Canberra an environmentally sound city. It is a city which is designed to reduce social anomalies despite its relative youth and rapid population growth over the last 25 years. The advantages of Canberra as a city to live in are recognised throughout the world, but most importantly by the majority of people who live here. You cannot expect to remove essential building blocks from any major structure and hope to retain its strength. Similarly, you cannot delete the more important social aspects from any section of our community and hope to retain the calibre of that society. What Mr Humphries has said is that we just have to accept this as a fact of life, and, with the safety issues that Mr Wood has raised, he should have said, a fact of death.
MR KAINE (Chief Minister) (3.46): Mr Speaker, the more I listen to this debate - and it has been going on for so long now that it is getting boring - the more I am convinced that the Opposition is flogging a dead horse in this matter. Opposition members have beaten it to death and they are now trying to turn it into mincemeat. An indicator of the interest in this subject is the number of people sitting in the media gallery right now. They are absolutely fed up to the back teeth with the rubbish that the Opposition keeps pushing forward on this issue.
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