Page 1557 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 12 August 1992
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The other issue that Mr De Domenico said the Government should look at is road spending. He said that we have slashed spending and that we are being short-sighted and are not looking at things. I think I have said on a number of occasions in this place, and certainly to the public through media releases, that the Government is undertaking at the moment a major study of our road network, with a view to coming up with some long-term decisions on what we should be spending on roads. There is no doubt that a strongly held view in the Canberra community is that historically we have spent too much on roads. Last year, I found through calls to my office - and I suspect that opposition members who were in government would have had the same experience - that if you asked the public, "Where are we wasting money?", they said, "On unnecessary roadworks". That was confirmed in the ratepayers survey. It is a clearly held view in the Canberra community.
It may well be that that view is wrong, and I have good reason to suspect that it is. But, as a government, for the first time we have devoted some resources to a baseline survey of the status of our roads. I caused some merriment in this place when I described the funny little vehicle with flashing lights which was running around the city at one o'clock in the morning putting down its little probe, drilling holes in our road surface, to give us an audit of the standard and quality of our roads throughout the city.
From that engineering side of the survey and from a financial survey, which we are doing of what comparable cities and regional municipal local government areas are spending on road fundings, I will be bringing to my colleagues in government and this Assembly a comprehensive report on the quality, state and value of our existing urban road infrastructure and a range of options for what governments should do well into the future in terms of appropriate levels of maintenance for that valuable infrastructure. A throwaway line from Mr De Domenico is that we should be thinking about that. The reality is that the Government has been thinking hard and devoting resources to coming up with long-term solutions for that problem.
Madam Speaker, I started by saying that it is pleasing to see that there is general support for this concept of urban renewal. But I was a bit disconcerted to hear some of Ms Szuty's remarks when she was quoting Professor Troy, because it really did sound like a hymn of praise for continued urban sprawl. I suspect that Troy would say, "No, I do not really want continued urban sprawl. I just want to stop". That is very difficult because it means no economic growth and that means no jobs for our kids, no future building. If we are to assume that we do not want a static Canberra, a Canberra with no growth - I think that view is shared by both major parties, but I do not know whether it is shared by the Independents or not - we have to decide whether we want continued urban sprawl or some form of urban renewal.
It is true that there is a lot of community concern about urban renewal, and some of the experience of urban renewal in Australia in the 1960s and the 1970s was simply appalling. It is understandable why people are opposed to it. The sort of six-pack - three up, three down - block of flats that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a shoe box with a slightly pitched roof is aesthetically appalling. It has major environmental problems. Ms Szuty mentioned some problems - that all you have is a little balcony; you cannot compost; and, because you have your six-pack shoe box surrounded by asphalt and concrete parking areas, there is nowhere for rainwater to run off. All of those problems are very valid criticisms
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