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and home to 300,000 people. But what is missing from both of those plans is a strategic overview of where we want Canberra to be heading. We need to develop the Territory Plan that extra step, giving it a stronger social context, from a document dealing with particular land uses without creating a vision of the city we will leave to future generations.

Some members of the Assembly may well remember the debate on the Land (Planning and Environment) Bill in 1991 when the Assembly added a specific provision, subsection 15(3), which envisaged the replacement of the NCDC Metropolitan Policy Plan of 1984 by “a further comprehensive strategy for the long-term development of land in the Territory”. We have now reached the point where a strategic plan is not only desirable but urgent. The Government will work actively with the Assembly's Planning and Environment Committee to start developing a strategic plan. The committee's role has the potential to provide both a consultative and a multiparty approach which might otherwise be missing from a bureaucrat-led planning process. In order for it to be a strategic plan, the detail must embrace the aspirations of all sections of the community and all shades of politics. That is a tough task and will probably take a long time; but, if we achieve nothing else in this Assembly, I think the people of Canberra will be pleased with a plan which offers the level of community ownership which many now recognise is missing.

There is, however, an important step which this Government believes should be taken to facilitate a more unified and sensible approach to Canberra's planning needs. No rational person would imagine that a city the size of Canberra would best be served by having two autonomous and often clashing planning bodies. What started out with the best of intentions has become a house divided - what I call the Capulet and Montague effect. I will be exploring with both the Federal Government and the Federal Opposition the prospect of rethinking the respective roles of the Commonwealth and the ACT in Canberra's planning.

If successful, that initiative would see the creation of a single statutory authority - say, the Canberra Planning Authority - which could be overseen by a board of joint Commonwealth and ACT appointees, under an independent chair, to manage the planning needs of the city of Canberra as the national capital, the centre of the region and the city which is home to 300,000 people and growing. I believe that the commonsense of ending Canberra's divided and unsynchronised planning regime will be recognised by members in this place and in the Federal Parliament. As proposed, this alternative model does not deliver dominant control to either government but recognises that the national capital and local dimensions are inextricably linked and interdependent.

There has been a lot of disquiet among local communities, particularly in the older inner parts of Canberra, about the expansive multiunit developments springing up all over Canberra - and, may I say, in many respects, rightfully so. We cannot continue to Kingstonise areas of Canberra where that concept is both unnecessary and in many cases unwelcome. That disquiet forced the previous Government's hand and we saw the

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