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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 3932 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

(2) if the Assembly is not sitting when the Committee completes its inquiry, it may send its Report to the Speaker or, in the absence of the Speaker, to the Deputy Speaker, who is authorised to give directions for its printing, circulation and publication;

(3) the foregoing provisions of this resolution, so far as they are inconsistent with standing orders, have effect notwithstanding anything contained in the standing orders; and

(4) the Assembly calls on the Government to take no further action to implement the Ainslie plan until the Committee has tabled its Report in the Assembly.

Once again this is an issue of some consternation that has been in the media. In fact, the Green members of the Assembly have taken on this issue with gusto, and for that I give them credit. They put a motion on the notice paper a little bit later, but neither of us was aware that the other was doing so. Mr Speaker, I think the issue raised is not only about the redevelopment of Ainslie. The proposal which I have in my hand for the redevelopment of Ainslie - I presume that members have seen it - has been put together on behalf of ACT Housing and the ACT Planning Authority, recognising that ACT Housing owns something in the order of a third of Ainslie residences. They clearly have a major role to play in this development, so they have put out this proposal for public consultation.

I know from their manifesto that Green members are quite keen on urban infill. They have a different approach from the one that I have taken. However, they have also represented the public notion that the consultation process on this issue has been entirely inadequate. Mr Speaker, I must say, as an aside, that I find some irony in that because it was only recently that the Greens used an almost identical consultation process on gambling. They consulted generally with key stakeholders in the community, as I understand it, over a quite long period, on the terms of gambling. Then they put together a proposal, put it out into the public arena and said, "This is the proposal, but we are not sticking to it necessarily. What will happen with gambling depends on the community response we get". On the surface, that seems to be a quite reasonable way to go about approaching the issue of gambling, poker machines, the casino and so forth. That is not dissimilar to the approach taken here. In this case ACT Housing is a key stakeholder. The Planning Authority talked to quite a number of key stakeholders before they put this proposal together. They put a proposal into the public arena and said, "We are not wedded to it. It is a proposal so that we have some debate".

It seems to me that the criticism of the Greens that the consultation process has been entirely inadequate needs to be questioned. That is something that I am happy to look at. In fact, I find some irony, Mr Speaker. I know that Ms Tucker was at the same meeting as I was. You were there last night yourself, Mr Speaker, at a meeting at the Institute of Sport, as was Mr Whitecross. We heard a presentation about John Dedman Parkway.

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