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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2663 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

It is our opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the last 30, 40 or 50 years in planning townships in the ACT. From my experience in planning, which I acknowledge is of about nine months' duration, it seems to me that this plan produces an exceptionally good response to that accumulated experience and knowledge.

This town centre is based on a non-mall model. It will not be the kind of town centre dominated by a large, single retail structure with a number of retail outlets within it. It will be, in a sense, a more low key kind of town centre; but it will still be very much the heart of an urban village - an urban village which has a close interaction with residential areas close to it and which also, I might indicate, is designed for medium-density development at its very outset. The other important element, of course, is the fact that we are proposing to have a town centre planned from the outset to meet the needs of people who wish to live in medium- to high-density accommodation. The great problem that we have encountered in the whole debate about urban infill in the last couple of years has been conversion of land from low-density to medium- or high-density housing. That has caused enormous problems for people in those areas. This area of Canberra will be, for the first time, different to that. It will be an area of Canberra in which certain medium- to high-density dwellings will already be there. It will therefore, I hope, overcome a number of the very acute problems that have been encountered in planning terms in the last few years.

Mr Berry made the interesting observation that apparently the legless lizard had the Labor Party to thank for its survival.

Mr Moore: No; he said "the previous committee", but go on.

MR HUMPHRIES: His words were, "This is an important save by Labor". I am not aware of any influence on the part of the Labor Party in our decision to put aside 500 hectares of land as a reserve for the habitat of the legless lizard. That is a major commitment. We have forgone, in one sense, many millions of dollars in potential revenue from housing on that land. A couple of major suburbs in Gungahlin have been more or less butchered to accommodate that grassland reserve for the legless lizard. It is a major shift in government policy. It was not in the draft presented to the Assembly committee last year. If my colleagues opposite have been responsible for the change, they have moved in extremely subtle and mysterious ways that are unclear to me. It seems that we cannot have any occasion when we simply celebrate our achievements; we have to throw some politics into it. Mr Berry also raised the question of the - - -

Mr Berry: There is politics in everything, Gary. What are you trying to pretend?

MR HUMPHRIES: Obviously, there is politics in everything. That is the way that you see things, Mr Berry.

The failure of DELP to move to Gungahlin was criticised by those opposite. I say to them that there is a very simple way of resolving this toing-and-froing about this issue. We say that it was not possible for Gungahlin to accommodate the DELP building, that the timeframe was inadequate and that the previous Government acquiesced in that process. My colleagues opposite say that that is not true. It seems to me that the person

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