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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1648 ..

MR WOOD (11.12): I believe that the Chief Minister should thank this Assembly and the committee for taking time to allow sense to come into the debate. She will not and certainly has not publicly, but I think perhaps frequently privately she heaves a sigh of relief and says, "Thank heavens they are doing that". The Chief Minister, I believe, early in government wanted a symbol of how dynamic her new Government was. She scouted around, looking for something that would act as a benchmark for what this Government was going to do in the future. There it was. Suddenly the idea emerged - Acton-Kingston land swap; get something going down there at Kingston. It was done in haste, and it is a good thing that a hold has been put on it so that some sense can be brought into the debate.

I want to make some comment because I was the Minister. I was once in a position, if I had taken it to the Government, to have initiated some action on this site. I have to say that I gave a little thought to it, but I was careful not to proceed beyond that. Let me point out the problems that occurred to me. There were the ordinary two - cost and what was going to go there. Let me deal with what would happen on this site. This would have been my thinking three or four years ago. At that time - and it is even worse now - there was no demand for retail space; we would not want to be putting shops there. Given the lead time that is needed before something might start to be built on that site - say, a three- to five-year period - and looking ahead at that period of time, we were not going to need any more retail space, in that area especially and in Canberra generally.

We were not going to need any more housing. The housing market was comfortable at that time, and we had predicted that it was going to slow down. We did not want any houses on that site. We would not need any office space. We have a plan that requires office space to be located in certain areas, and that is not one of the areas. Maybe a hotel could have been put there. Maybe some eatery could have been put there. The whole problem that emerged was: What would you put on that site? It all sounds wonderful. In time, it will be a great facility, a better version of Darling Harbour or something with a great mix of residential, office, recreation and retail - all those things; but in the period that we are looking at there was going to be no demand for it, no demand at all. We were well and truly covered across Canberra as it was then and as it is now.

Then I looked at the cost. It was going to be a very expensive operation. The Chief Minister has changed her tack, as she often does, from her original statements. The cost was considerable. In earlier statements in this Assembly, she said, "There is no cost to the ACT community. The developer will pay for it". In a sense, that is right. The developer would pay for it. Part of the conditions after the auction, the tender or whatever process was used would be that the person who acquired the site would do all the clean-up, all the renovations, et cetera. But, of course, what the Chief Minister - I think genuinely - did not know was that that cost would come off the price that was paid for it. The ACT taxpayers, who have to pay for it, did not know that either. No matter what, in the end the ACT taxpayers have to pay for it.

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