Page 1512 - Week 05 - Thursday, 12 May 1994
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but in your approach. Last, but not least, we look forward to the first report of Dr Joe Baker, the Environment Commissioner. Maybe then we will see where the Government and this city are heading as far as the environment is concerned. That is all I have to contribute to the debate on those two papers, Madam Speaker.
MR MOORE (4.50): Madam Speaker, I think it is important in this cognate debate to reiterate a couple of things that have been said by Ms Szuty and Mr Westende. The most important thing is the notion that so much of what we have before us is just words and plans. I do not think that anybody reading these statements would find difficulties with them. They ask questions and they ask for contributions, and that is an appropriate way for the Government to seek community opinion. I notice that the response date, for example, on the environmental strategy discussion paper was Monday, 28 February. I will be interested to hear the Minister tell us what sort of a response he had to the paper in terms of the number and quality of submissions, if he is aware of those. The paper was prepared, Madam Speaker, in the light of the 2020 vision, and appropriately so, and also in the context of the national ecologically sustainable development principles and the intergovernmental agreement on the environment. With background work like that, quite clearly the Government had the opportunity to lean on a great deal of work that had already been done, and appropriately so.
I had intended to go through the papers in bits and pieces as I had marked them, but I think that has been done fairly well by the two previous speakers. Instead, as a general comment, I will merely say that these papers contain a series of very positive statements; nevertheless, we need more than mere statements.
Madam Speaker, I will take up the point that my colleague Ms Szuty raised in terms of urban consolidation, and the issues raised by her and, of course, Professor Patrick Troy when speaking a couple of weeks ago to the subject, "Is there a con in urban consolidation?". That appears to be the case the longer we look at it. Whilst places like Kingston do have a role, I think that if we were to do that again we ought to do it very differently. That is what people mean when they talk about Kingstonisation, as Ms Szuty put it. We do not want to Kingstonify the rest of Canberra. It has its place and it meets certain needs, but it has not improved the inner city facilities that Mr Westende spoke about. It has failed to develop in such a way that families come back into the area and that facilities such as schools and so forth are used and the shops enhanced. In fact, it had just the opposite effect. The Government was forced to close down a school very close to Kingston.
In terms of the consultation process, Madam Speaker, it is important for us to remember that, even when a document like this goes out for discussion, people in Canberra are very busy living their own lives and spending time with their children. To sit back and do an esoteric assessment of a paper along these lines is very difficult. What we do know is that people become very involved in issues when they affect them personally, when they can see an impact on them. The easy way to deal with that is to say, "That is because people are NIMBYs". Often it starts with a NIMBY approach, but people then look and see what there is about a policy that is distressing them. It may well be just that they do
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