Page 61 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 22 February 1994
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The heavy role adopted by both committees I have been involved in, but particularly the PDI Committee, and the role adopted by the community in participating in that process was to find and help to facilitate that method. Even though we may have had differing ways of coming to a conclusion on the subject, the one thing that was unanimous was everybody's wish that we somehow find a way through the web of information and the web of emotion and get to a point where we had a means of facilitating that work. I am very pleased to have been part of this report because I believe that we have come up with a way of doing just that.
I agree with the points made by Mr Kaine and Ms Szuty, particularly in regard to tourism, but I see it as going a little further than that. I wish to be daring enough to say that, if the variation presented by the PDI Committee is picked up by Government, promoted and done properly, we will see an exciting tourism dot on the map in Tuggeranong. I do not think it is too far fetched to imagine that buses and tourists will actually go down there to see such an innovative and imaginative project in urban design. I am quite excited that we might have a tourism development on our hands. It is not so much that you will be able to buy craft work or a beer and a hamburger at a lunch spot, but that you will see a different, new, exciting and innovative approach to urban development. I think the challenge is now on the whole of the community to say, "Okay; how can we do this best, considering the recommendations in that report?". I do not think it was ever fair, correct or accurate to suggest at any time in this process that residential development on that block was a fait accompli. It would be cheating the system we have gone through to say that or to have suggested it at any time through the process.
I believe that every single member of the PDI Committee has carefully and properly examined all of the evidence before them. The committee has gone very carefully through all of that information and, I believe, has come up with a very workable solution. One comment I have made to some members of the community, and I will take the opportunity of saying it tonight, is that headlines give one story, the full information gives another. I urge all interested people not to read just recommendations or chapter headings in this report but to read the report in its entirety and to consider carefully all of the information put together by the members of the PDI Committee. If you do that, it will be very difficult to be disappointed; even though I understand that some may be, I think it would be difficult to take that position.
I very firmly believe that we have an exciting project in front of us. It has great potential, and I think it is a terrific challenge to the community as a whole to see what we can do with this and to what degree we can set up a modern, model urban development. I wish everybody involved in it all the very best, particularly the community groups, who now will have, in my view, a legitimate and proper role in an ongoing way in helping to create that environment and an involvement in it for the future. I have great pleasure in commending this variation to the Assembly.
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