Page 1549 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 12 August 1992
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The difficulty that I have with what Mr Lamont and the Minister have presented is that it does not fit into an integrated strategy, an integrated plan, for what should happen in Canberra over the next few years. That does not mean that a strategy has to be that over the next five years we are going to have buildings specifically on block 15, section 32, et cetera. A strategy is a concept. It is saying that we really need to develop in a given way and that, having developed that strategy, each of the actions that are taken by government and individual departments within that government should fit into that strategy. The strategy itself should, in effect, be a living thing. It should be something that can be looked at and changed, and the strategy should apply as long as it is working. The strategy that we had for Canberra over the past few years is best and most easily described in planning terms as the Y plan. As a planning strategy it was particularly good, and it fitted the needs of Canberra at the time. What we need now is a much broader strategy that includes economic and employment considerations; it should include the gamut of matters that affect our population.
Many people argue that one of the best advantages of urban renewal is that the infrastructure is preserved and can be used by more people. Ms Szuty quoted from Professor Troy - I shall come back to that - about this. I think we have some very good examples to look at in the ACT. Did the urban renewal in Kingston, with all its problems, save the schools in the area? Did it increase the number of people in the schools, and are the schools in Kingston currently more viable than the schools in the inner north of Canberra - for example, Ainslie Primary School, which is now turning away students; it is no longer taking out-of-area students - or is an urban renewal going on in terms of the types of families that are moving back into the older areas?
Mr Lamont: Yuppie.
MR MOORE: If we use an urban renewal system that means that we are going to have high density or medium density living, whom is that going to have an impact on? When I talked about families moving into those areas Mr Lamont interjected, "Yuppie". Earlier I suggested to Mr Lamont and the Minister that they read Professor Troy's paper so that they can understand an appropriate academic approach. It does not mean that everything that Professor Troy says is gospel, but you need to account for what he has said and know the arguments against it.
One of the arguments that Professor Troy put in his paper on "the new feudalism" is that with urban renewal the people who suffer most are the poor, because the prices of those medium density houses that are now built in the inner city areas are rarely - certainly it does not happen in Canberra - lower than prices in the greenfields development.
Mrs Carnell: They are higher in Canberra.
MR MOORE: They are much more expensive. Therefore, the people who miss out are those who are poorer. I think it is important, in a social justice sense, to look very carefully at what Professor Troy has said, and to make sure that you do not believe that you are providing, in the inner city, a balanced residence, as we have had in most of Canberra.
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