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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (22 May) . . Page.. 1630 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

have spent quite a deal of money; the Government has spent quite a deal of money in other places to provide better surfaces. A simple thing like that does make the city look very untidy. It is very difficult to contain. I really wonder at the habits of some people. I do not know how their floors at home survive. This is a productive report. I read it with a great deal of interest. I think it has taken us fairly well along the track, and I can assure Minister Humphries and his colleagues that I will be very interested in the follow-up action.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (3.56), in reply: Mr Speaker, I thank members opposite for their support for what this process puts in place. I would be surprised if they were not supportive, since they were involved in initiating it. Perhaps it is unfortunate that there has been a relatively brief debate on this subject, because designing out crime, I think, holds an enormously important place in the overall strategy we pursue in this Assembly towards reducing the level of crime in our community. Members who have taken the opportunity in recent years of wandering around some places in Civic, in particular after dark, would have had a very eloquent illustration of how large a problem we have to overcome, both through forward design of new public spaces in the Territory and in overcoming the deficiencies of our existing public spaces, which need to be comprehensively rethought.

Areas such as the back alleys behind the Melbourne and Sydney buildings are very good examples of how badly the ACT has been served by some designs, which probably were very progressive in their day and which probably served certain purposes. Probably that dark alleyway behind the Sydney Building was of no particular consequence in terms of the safety of the city, because when it was built - it was one of the very first public buildings to be built in the city - there was a very small population in the ACT, only a few thousand people, and the idea of feeling unsafe in Canberra was a quite novel concept. Unfortunately, our city has grown up, and there are now a number of people who feel unsafe in areas of Canberra such as that, and it is our job now to reconsider the purpose and the role of those public spaces, to redesign them, and to bring them into a different way of serving the community.

Redesigning does not mean necessarily that they should be knocked down and some new building built in their place or even that, for example, in that alleyway I spoke of before, the trees should be taken down in order to improve lines of sight. Those sorts of things are possible, but probably not the best solutions. In many ways, we can overcome problems in these areas by redesigning the way in which they are used. For example, if some of the shops and licensed establishments in the Sydney Building were to have entrances on the back as well as on the front, that is, onto the alleyway as well as onto Northbourne Avenue and East Row, we would find a considerable improvement in the flowthrough of people in those areas. They would not be at the back end, they would be simply at the other entrance, and there would be more light and more life, and at night those areas would not be so intimidating. Canberra has a number of areas with these sorts of problems, but I think it is fair to say that there are fewer areas of that kind than in places such as Sydney or Melbourne.

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