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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1912 ..

Ms Horodny: Not in Belconnen.

Ms McRae: You should get a brief on this, Tony. There has been a public meeting. You should find out what you are talking about.

MR SPEAKER: Order! The Minister is answering the question.

MR DE DOMENICO: I am aware that there has been a public meeting, Ms McRae. Ms Horodny, if any of those people have those concerns and want to express them to me, my door is always open. I welcome any submissions that they may make to me. On reading those submissions, the Government will make a decision on what it can do.

MS HORODNY: There have been a number of letters, Minister, and they have come through us as well. My supplementary question is this: What forward planning is being done by your department to develop traffic management plans for that area to address increasing traffic from Gungahlin before it occurs, given that Gungahlin is expanding to the west and closer to North Belconnen and that Clarrie Hermes Drive will eventually be built to link Gungahlin with Kuringa Drive and subsequently with North Belconnen? What forward planning is being done?

MR DE DOMENICO: Ms Horodny, in terms of the details of exactly what forward planning has been done, I cannot tell you that here today. However, if you want a full briefing on what forward planning the Government intends to do, I am quite happy to give you a full briefing as well.

MR WOOD: My question is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, among the many decisions reached at your recent meeting, the one that has been focused on today, was one which read, "Build an international airport at Goulburn" - not Canberra, but Goulburn. Nowhere in any of these documents is there even a mention of building an international airport at Canberra. In your earlier answers you said that this was a long list of ideas; but there was not even an idea, a suggestion or a proposal for an airport at Canberra. Chief Minister, if your secret agenda is to push for an airport at Goulburn and not Canberra, why have you persistently deceived the Canberra community by assuring them that a major priority is to have an international airport here in Canberra, not Goulburn?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, the very clear reason for that is that having an international airport here in Canberra is Liberal Party policy. It is there on paper. It was there at the last election. There was absolutely no need to make it Liberal Party policy. That is policy passed by a policy convention. The Liberal Party, of course, has a very democratic approach to policy. It actually has to pass through the rank and file of the party. In fact, a lot of it comes from the party itself. As we have a policy that the Canberra Airport should have international capacity, there was no need to list it.

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