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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 2810 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

A key objective of the Canberra Liberals is therefore to ensure that passenger and freight services, whether public or private, both within the ACT and between the ACT and other centres, make the greatest contribution possible to the standard of living in the ACT.

We presume that that is not just the standard of living of a few middle-class or upper-middle-class people, such as me, but also the standard of living of all people in the ACT. Can the Minister tell us where we are up to with the very slow development of the very fast train proposal? Are we tilting, are we Magleving, are we fast training? Is there a coordinated approach to link the rail system to Sydney and Melbourne with an international airport, perhaps at Goulburn, and what about our surrounding areas? What about the international freight airport? Have the sites for these airports been seriously looked at yet or not? Can the Minister inform us of his planning for the future development of the Kings Highway and the Federal Highway and what he is doing about those? Is the Government contemplating a Kennett tollway express response? Remember that Jeff Kennett promised that there would be alternative routes for people who do not use the tollway, but those alternative routes invariably wind up meaning that you have to drive all the way around the rest of Melbourne. What attempts have been made at arrangements with New South Wales to meet the costs of these roads?

Have we been offered a pup, Mr Speaker, on strategic issues associated with transport planning? How many times has this Assembly discussed the issue of a general strategic plan for Canberra, and in what way does it apply to transport planning? Are we going to listen to a cacophony of blunders? Are we just going to watch a series of band-aids and afterthoughts in planning? We have the opportunity to get it right from the beginning with a comprehensive transport policy for the next century, and that is what we ought to be doing.

MR DE DOMENICO (Minister for Urban Services) (4.06): Mr Speaker, I thank Mr Moore for raising this issue of a coordinated strategy in public transport for the ACT. What an important issue it is, and Mr Moore has shown that he is interested not only in areas the press tend to concentrate on, such as drug law reform and things like that, but also - - -

Mr Moore: Drugs, sex and death, Tony.

MR DE DOMENICO: Sex, rock'n'roll and whatever it is, but also on things like coordinated public transport in the ACT. Very shortly, I will outline to the Assembly the range of measures the Government is undertaking to develop and improve the efficiency of our public transport services. Firstly, however, I would like to remind members that Canberra's urban development and transport systems are largely a product of Commonwealth management of the Territory from Federation to self-government in 1989. The planning and development of modern Canberra has been based on the Y plan, which, as members know, was designed to cope with the rapid growth of the national capital. The concept was retained in both reviews of metropolitan Canberra: Tomorrow's Canberra - 1971 and the Metropolitan Policy Plan in 1984.

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