Page 51 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 22 February 1994
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Mr Moore: He knew that when he bid.
[~Bold MR DE DOMENICO: No, that is not so. Mr Moore might care to listen. Had Mr Willemsen decided not to build any public car spaces whatsoever, he could have gone ahead and built more residential units on that plot without needing a planning variation at all. He could have gone ahead and done whatever he liked. But Mr Willemsen - who, as people would know, is responsible for some of the more aesthetic developments in this town - said, "The best thing that I believe should go on that corner block is a mixture of retail, commercial and residential". I happened to agree with him, as did the majority of the committee.
There is no doubt that more work needs to be done at the Kingston shopping centre. We have a magnificent area of Canberra here that can be made even better if we sit down and make decisions based on facts, keeping in mind that planning guidelines are simply that - guidelines. Mr Willemsen has a 99-year lease on this plot of land. He could have stuck a big fence around it and done nothing with it, and we would have lost any facility whatsoever for public car spaces. It is all so wrong to assume that because people used to park their cars on that plot of land it was public land. It was not public land. There was a lease on that land that Mr Willemsen bought. He could have put a fence around the land and said, "You had 120 public car spaces. You have none now. I will hold onto the land for 99 years or wait until the economy improves and then put on it whatever I like, without seeking approval for a variation". To say that there was an imposition on the developer is not correct.
There is no doubt that we have to sort out once and for all the situation that two towers are good enough, but three are not. I think the National Capital Planning Authority have a lot to answer for in that regard. People also need to think about sticking to guidelines per se and to the letter of the law, which puts the maximum plot ratio at 0.8. As I say to the people who wrote that letter that Ms Szuty read from: Why is 0.8 not good? Why is 1.2 any better than 0.8? Why do we not look at 1.1 or 1.3?
The other argument is that the guidelines were not adhered to for the Somerset development over the road; that Somerset breaks the guidelines in three or four areas. Why did people not stand up and not give approval for Somerset? Nothing was said about Somerset when it went through this Assembly. Yet guidelines were broken there. But breaking guidelines is not the way in which we ought to be looking at this issue. My view is that the public interest is better served with a mixture of development, with public car spaces not only for the people who live in Kingston but also for the many other people who wish to shop in Kingston. I think the public interest is better served by allowing for a mixed development. Remember that the developer himself has been waiting a long time and could have done nothing with the land. There was no imposition on him whatsoever, but he is prepared to spend $1.5m to provide public car spaces as part of what he knows - and he has been in this town for a long time, and his parents before him - will be an aesthetically attractive development in that magnificent area of Canberra called Kingston.
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