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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3143 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The original proposal pushed the development envelope for that site to the limit. The plot ratio, as defined in the Territory Plan, as far as I can recall was exceeded; the encroachment on the boundaries was exceeded; and there were two or three ways in which the proposal contravened and went beyond the specifications in the Territory Plan. Adjacent residents took exception to that and voiced their opposition to it very strongly. During the entire hearings in connection with this matter, there was no mention of hotels, serviced apartments on the scale of a hotel - nothing like that. This was low-cost residential accommodation.

It is a little disturbing, two or three years later, to discover that there is a hotel on the site. Let us be clear: It is a hotel, no ifs or buts. All you have to do is drive past it. In fact, the sign on the front of the building says that it is a residential hotel. I am confused as to how, with all the emphasis that has been placed on the Territory Plan and the lack of public confidence in the processes of planning, this can occur. It is the kind of development that causes people living out in the suburbs to have no confidence whatsoever in the planning processes.

The second aspect is that there is a public restaurant on the site. There was never any mention of a public restaurant on the site when the proposal was being discussed by the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee; yet we have a publicly accessible restaurant there. When you ask the officials to explain to you how this all occurs, it is clear that the administration seems to think there are huge loopholes that can be driven through in interpreting what can be done and what cannot be done. Nobody has yet explained to me how it is that the proprietor of that place got a licence to run a publicly accessible restaurant in which liquor is served, for a start. That was never envisaged, never included in the plan; yet there it is. You get no satisfaction when you call officials before the committee to explain how this all happened. It is obvious that everything is very obscure, it is not clear, they are not too sure how it happened; yet there it is.

I have great concerns about it. It is a classic case of a development from which the members of the community can reasonably assume that development is out of control. That is not what was originally put forward; it has evolved into something totally different from what was originally envisaged and what was considered by the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee. I submit that, if the other members of the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee had known at the time that this was the intention, I would not have been the only dissenting member of the committee at the time. It is a bit disturbing.

The other aspect of it goes way beyond this development. There is an inability, as Mr Moore has pointed out, to differentiate between residential apartments, where somebody turns their house into a couple of apartments and rents them off, on the one hand, and a massive development like this which, all of a sudden, becomes serviced apartments and, indeed, a residential hotel. It raises questions, as Mr Moore has pointed out, in connection with at least one other development that has already been approved, the old Starlight Drive-In site. Approximately half of that was to be serviced apartments and the other half was to be residential accommodation. We raised the question at the time: How are you, the officials, going to ensure that only X number of

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