Page 1540 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 12 August 1992
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urban infill going to occur? Is the Chief Minister going to put back in the Territory Plan some of those "pink bits" that, during the election campaign, very expeditiously and expediently she took out? In putting them back in, is there going to be some consultation?
From what I have read, and neither the Minister nor the Chief Minister has told me anything about their $70m-odd program - we are supposed to take them on faith, and so are the other 290,000-odd people out there supposed to take them on faith that this is a good project. But how do we know? Whom have they consulted? One question came up this morning. Are the two separate redevelopment projects in Dickson part of this grandiose plan or are they outside of it? Are they part of the $71m, $72m, $73m or whatever the figure is? I am quite confounded, Madam Speaker. I do not know what the Government's intentions are. I do not think the Government know what their intentions are, but it is about time they started telling people where their taxes are going to go. If they are getting $13m from the Commonwealth under the better cities program, how much of the ACT taxpayers' money is going to go into this? Why do you not come clean and tell us what you mean? Why do you not give Mr Lamont enough information so that when he gets up and prattles on about urban renewal he can actually tell us what your plan is? It is another one of your secret agendas. Do not tell anybody about it until after the event. It is unacceptable, Madam Speaker.
This sudden realisation on the part of this Government that we need to change our planning approach to Canberra is astounding. We have been talking about changing the planning approach to Canberra during the entire life of this Legislative Assembly. That is why we came up with a new set of planning legislation. It is why we developed a new draft Territory Plan. What has been done in the past is no longer appropriate. That was done under Commonwealth auspices. They built a city. They built it well; you cannot argue about that. But in the doing, when they transferred the responsibility to us, they left us with some major problems. Mr Lamont touched upon those problems - the fact that we have a widely dispersed city; the fact that we are too dependent on the automobile; the fact that we have more roads than anybody else, the capital cost of those roads had to be paid for, they have to be maintained, and presumably they are being used at the expense of our public transport system.
There is also the fact that up until now we have concentrated on three or four regional centres. Do we need those three or four regional centres? What is the future for Civic Centre? When are we going to define where Civic Centre fits into the total scheme of things and what we want it to look like in 30 years' time? There should be a subplan attached to the Territory Plan that deals with that. You can no longer confine it to the small area between the lake, the university, Braddon and Reid. As the population of the ACT grows - and it is going to continue to grow - so will Civic Centre grow. We can either make it grow in a planned way, so that it looks as we want it to look in 30 years' time, or let it grow on an ad hoc basis, which is the policy the Labor Party seems to be pursuing - "Do not let us have a plan. Let it just happen. If somebody wants to put a building up, sure, we will either approve it or disapprove it. If we need a new road somewhere, well, yes, we will either approve it or disapprove it. Let us not look at it in the scheme of a total plan for the ACT".
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