Page 6203 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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wishes could speak to this. However, there is one particular problem. There is an obligation today to be brief and to the point, so I do not propose to take up much time.
It does seem to me that many of the challenges for the future are already laid down. We have discussed them from time to time. Some of them have come up very recently. I congratulate the Government on offering us such a challenge in connection with the statement Mr Berry has just made, for example. I would love to have time to talk about an international airport, as we gaze out into the future from the top of Mount Ainslie or something of that kind; but I will set that aside.
Would that we could have a seminar of all of us, independently, as we look at challenges for the future. But I want just briefly to indicate six by name and say very briefly something about them - one, institutional; two, social economy; three, naturalness; four, education and research; five, a complex culture; and six, a place of pilgrimage.
I think the first challenge is to produce a form of self-government, with appropriate democratic mechanisms, which is best fitted to the people of Canberra. Whether the Second Assembly will approve this particular system we have here remains to be seen. That in itself we could debate all afternoon.
Secondly, the overall social economy of Canberra requires that it be a place of expertise and excellence, not just one more heavily bureaucratised metropolis. There needs to be room for the private sector to grow.
Thirdly, we need to maintain our naturalness, our place as Australia's bush capital. In relation to this, we need effective land, environmental and heritage planning under our new legislation to protect our future.
Fourthly - and here we come back again to what Mr Berry has just been talking about - it is necessary that there be stress on education and research. I do not mean elitist education in a bad sense, but an overall excellence of education, including private education from preschools to tertiary institutions and, as we have just heard, new developments in postgraduate education - not just for education, but as the industrial base for our economic future. Our future lies in this area of education and research and what flows from it.
Fifthly, we should be a free-flowing city, a complex culture of people well aware of the dangers of overly large cohorts at any level of the population. That we have to look at in the 1990s. Finally, I would argue that the most exciting thing for us on the tourist and visitor frontier is to be a place of pilgrimage for all Australians and for visitors from overseas.
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