Page 1655 - Week 06 - Thursday, 20 May 1993
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The outcome of the community consultation process highlighted the requirement of this community to maintain the amenity that exists in Canberra today. Much of the debate focused on open space, retention of buffers and the hills, maintaining the status quo in terms of the availability of public land and the like, and I believe that we have satisfied that community demand. I doubt that there will be much cause for criticism that we have ignored that requirement imposed on us by the community. I certainly hope that they would at least see that we have done the best we can to strike a balance between the need for further development, the need for accommodating our increasing population on the one hand, and the need to preserve the amenity of the city on the other.
There are a couple of matters we built in. For example, there has been much discussion in recent years about the concept of urban villages. The plan as it came to us did not mention that concept at all, and we felt that some reference to this new concept of the way cities and town centres might be developed in the future was required in the document. We have included a section that deals with the concept of urban villages and recognises that they are an appropriate form for the further development of Canberra.
I said that the process is not quite complete. This document is now a public document. It has to weather public scrutiny. Just as over a period of four years there have been people who have had very strong views about the subject and have made their views known, I am quite sure that during the period this is under consideration by the Assembly there will be people still who will want to put views to the effect that there are deficiencies in the document. So the debate is not quite over yet, and I hope that members of the Assembly continue to listen to those voices, as I believe we have done up until now. Once it gets through this Assembly it has to go back to the Executive, and that is where the decisions will be made. I am confident that, when the document leaves this chamber and goes to the Executive for its final endorsement and approval, the issues will have been well canvassed, the Executive will be well briefed on the process, on people's views about that process and, over the next few days and perhaps weeks, on the final document that is presented by the committee to the Assembly for its consideration today.
I also would like to pay tribute to my colleagues on the Planning Committee. We come from disparate political positions, and I think the way in which we have been able to work in the committee to arrive at a common view has been quite remarkable. It has often been said that perhaps the best feature of this Assembly is the way its committee structure works. This is without doubt one of the major achievements of the Assembly in its lifetime so far. This document has seen some emotional responses from some sectors of the community. It would be going too far to say that, for example, the Liberal Party and the Labor Party see the future development of Canberra in the same way. Yet we have produced a document which we believe collectively is the right document, as far as it goes, for the development of Canberra, at least for the next 15 years or so. We have not had any blood-letting. It has been a matter of discussion and arriving at a consensus view, and I think that is what our committees ought to be about.
I would like to pay tribute also to the officers of the ACT Planning Authority. They have responded on very short notice to some very difficult demands placed on them by the Planning Committee. They have met every challenge, and I know that some of them have been burning the midnight oil and working on weekends.
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