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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2658 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

to ensure that the Gungahlin Town Centre proceed. The committee was very much of the opinion that we should, if at all possible, proceed with this variation. However, we were not prepared to do so if we saw any fundamental flaw in the plan. There were some areas of difficulty.

The report deals quite well, I believe, with the issue of the southern end of Kosciusko Avenue, where it comes out of Palmerston, where residents had hoped to have a direct connection to the town centre. The evidence before us was that this would have a significant impact on the endangered species, and we were not prepared to approve that. We concurred with the Planning Authority on that issue and on a number of other issues. For example, the Master Builders Association raised the issue of sun glare, with an east-west alignment of the grid of the town centre. The Planning Authority presented to us a map. The Master Builders Association, after looking at a larger map than the one that it had been working from, agreed that it is not an east-west alignment at all but has enough of a variation from east-west to avoid that problem. Nevertheless, it was an appropriate issue for the association to raise and did cause the committee enough concern to get more evidence about it.

The other issue which was of particular concern to the community was the main street in the Gungahlin Town Centre. We believe that the Gungahlin Town Centre should be of a village type. It was particularly important to the committee that this not be disrupted by a major flowthrough of traffic. For that reason, our first recommendation was:

The committee endorses the draft Variation to the Territory Plan ... for the Gungahlin Town Centre and Central Area.

That was our first and overriding recommendation. We did make a second recommendation, and it was:

The committee is concerned about the capacity for normal traffic (that is, other than public transport) to have unrestricted access to some of the main streets in the Town Centre - thus possibly inhibiting the full working of the urban village concept. The committee requests that the Planning Authority keep this matter under review and that the committee be regularly informed about developments in this regard.

We believe that that street will be constructed in such a way that the effect will be not dissimilar to what you might find in Garema Place or an area like that. This is the feeling that the committee had, and it is an issue that we hope that the Planning Authority will come back to us on. We did not believe that it was an adequate reason for us to reject the variation to the Territory Plan. We hope that the Minister will recognise that the committee, in framing its recommendations in this way, actually allowed the variation to proceed rather than use this issue as an issue that would stop the variation. I hope that the Minister, in considering that, will ensure that the committee is fully informed by and

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