Page 515 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 1993
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After a resolution from the Assembly, presumably in another part of the administration, we can come up with what is clearly a forward looking outlook which at the end of the study, based on this first document, will give us a very good insight into where Canberra is going. I do not understand what it is about administration and government that you have two different elements to the organisation: One after four years produces what is supposed to be the solution to our planning problems for the next, I would have thought, 25 to 30 years, but in fact it only talks about 15 years and therefore lacks strategic thinking; and here we have, on very short notice, a very short timescale, a document that reflects that administration is capable of doing a decent job of work.
Mr Wood: Perhaps they are required to do different things.
MR KAINE: Do these people not talk to each other, Minister? That is the point that I am making. We have one rather small administration here and yet two parts of it do not seem to be able to talk to each other and to come up with a common result.
The paradox goes even further because the plan, I am told, extends only to about 2005 or maybe 2010. In the same timescale, this EPACT paper No. 2, which was published only in September last year, in the executive summary on page 1 talks about Canberra reaching a population of 400,000, which is forecast to take place around 2005. Here we have another document which presumably is going to become the definitive document and it says that we will get maybe to 400,000 by the year 2020. That is a 15-year timescale difference. One says that we are going to achieve it by 2005; the other says that if we are lucky we might get there by 2020.
We have always had trouble with population projections. I was doing a clean-out exercise recently and throwing all sorts of accumulated garbage out of my garage, some of it going back to the old Legislative Assembly of 1974. One of the things that I kept as I was going through it was all of the population projections produced by the NCDC and other bodies over a period of nearly 20 years. It makes fascinating reading. They never once got it right. I suspect that now we are going into another long-term projection, and who did get it right? Did the Chief Minister's Economic Priorities Advisory Committee get it right or did the author of this document get it right?
Mr Wood: Like Fraser, if Hewson gets in it will go down again.
MR KAINE: I do not know. This document says that even if we went into a decline we might get to 400,000. I suppose that is the worst case scenario. That would be if the present Government stays in place for another three years, presumably; but the best case scenario is a different figure and that obviously was based on the fact that the Hewson coalition government will be in place. It is interesting to read the various documents and to draw some comparisons.
The other interesting aspect of this paper - I will be quite brief - is that when we get down towards the end of it it talks about stage 2. They did not put timescales on this but it says that stage 1 was a review of previous strategic plans and related material, and I presume that this was the end product of stage 1. It says that in stage 2, which it did not put a timescale on, there would be an elaboration of issues and there would be a series of issues papers developed.
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