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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (22 May) . . Page.. 1588 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

It all came about a long time ago, and we have all been struggling with it ever since, as Mr Humphries well knows. All that process has been done and has been done to a level of excellence which shows up some of our own problems with planning within the ACT which are much more profound than the social processes that are now being undertaken in the preliminary assessment process.

All the issues that Mrs Carnell raised are of serious concern. Their stand is blatantly hypocritical. One could argue against what is being argued now. Never mind, I will not be churlish about that. What should have been done in Tuggeranong was clear, but what should be done now is even clearer. First of all, we cannot turn back the clock, as other members have said. There is no romantic ideal about local shops. They did not serve my purposes when my three children were young. Neither did the local suburban centre serve the purposes of any mother with three children; nor did it serve the purposes of ageing people. For instance, the local shops where I lived never had a pharmacy. My mother needs to go to a pharmacy. Instantly, the local shops did not serve her needs. There is a range of needs that individual families have that the hierarchy of shops never dealt with. We have been shown quite clearly in the expert work that has been done by Lend Lease that there has been a major shift in community attitude to shopping and to what a shopping centre can provide. They have not done that out of the blue. They have done that against the requirements that this Assembly has set as statutory requirements, and they have done it with great thoroughness.

That leads back to the matters, as I said, which Mrs Carnell raised against us a couple of years back and which still remain questions for us as an Assembly to solve. They are social issues which this development has, in essence, nothing to do with; they are the challenges to the greater plan. What are we doing about public transport? How are we responding to the needs of our ageing community? What are we doing for mothers and their children? What are we doing for frail people who cannot use the roads and transport? Those questions remain.

Whether or not Woden Plaza goes ahead with its development, whether or not the town centres expand, those social issues remain. But developing or not developing on some romantic notion of what the local shop did and did not do is not the way forward. The way forward is to understand what will make people's lives easier and what people do want; and then proceed on the basis of thorough information, not on the basis of some Mr Stevenson-type survey. I believe that the preliminary assessment work that has been put before us has done a lot of that work. I think the Government has now done that further work. I will look with great interest at that work, because I fear that we are getting messages today that the clock is going to be turned back; and I would be very fearful of that. To move backwards now, when we have before us a range of information which is at odds with some of the romantic notions that we have about what is a good community, would be foolish indeed. What we need to do is come to grips with what people are saying, doing and acting out in our city.

Despite all our ideas about how local shopping centres work, where do the vast majority of people go? To our town centres. Despite all our efforts to suggest that the local shops fulfil a basic need, where do people go? To the town centres. It is not something that I want to believe in, because it is against my notions of social justice. I always believe -

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