Page 2575 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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Thank you, Mr Speaker, and members. Urban issues are important to the ACT. Mr Jensen and I solely represented this august Assembly at the Housing Industry Association briefing night the other night, attended by some 200 lean and hungry looking people, mostly estate agents.
Mr Jensen: Dennis was there.
MR COLLAERY: I am sorry; Mr Stevenson was present. He was not present when I was there.
There was criticism of the Federal Government's initiatives on housing by the national director of the Housing Industry Association. He expressed some cynicism about urban consolidation. He took the view that it is not necessarily cheaper to go up two or three storeys on the same sites in the city; that infrastructure research required further work, and he queried this whole emphasis. So, it is clear that out there there is still a broad-acre push. Broad-acres deliver a certain market to a certain interested building community.
Some of the comments by Mr Silberberg merit further review and I trust that the Chief Minister will get the relevant areas of the Government to speak to the HIA to see what substance there is in a suggestion that it is not necessarily cheaper to move into urban consolidation. There are very informed research papers, particularly by consultants to the New South Wales Government, that show that urban consolidation, properly managed, is the only way to go to rein in the destruction of our agricultural areas close to major cities.
Mr Speaker, the States and Territories manifestly will be advantaged from the communique. I conclude my comments by saying that in the $480m home and community care area, in the supported accommodation area and in some of the disability and rehabilitation areas, the bell is tolling. Serious damage could be done that will retard development of proper uniform services in the country for the most disadvantaged.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (11.26): Mr Speaker, it is heartening to hear the unanimity that is being displayed by the Premiers and the Prime Minister at the Special Premiers Conference, and the bipartisanship is echoed in this Assembly. There really does seem to be a unique window of opportunity in the next few years to make real progress on issues of federalism that have been bedevilling this country since Federation in 1901.
It is extraordinary that as we are starting to celebrate the centenary of the process of federation, the centenary of that series of popular conventions that led to the idea of federated Australia, some of the benefits that were
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