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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 3939 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (11.06): Mr Speaker, I would like to describe to the house the process whereby we have reached the point we are at today. I wish to defend very forcefully indeed the intentions of the process, but I have to acknowledge that because there is a level of concern in the community there has to be some acceptance by the Government that the process has not resulted in the kind of outcome that we wanted. Obviously, as Minister for Planning I have to accept that. It has not satisfied the community and that indicates, therefore, that there is obviously some flaw in the process.

However, I would ask the Assembly to consider that this process was handled with the intention of overcoming these sorts of problems and with the intention of involving the community, I think for the first time in the way we have handled planning in the ACT, in a process of genuinely trying to determine the way development would affect a particular suburb in Canberra. For a long time it has been stated, almost as a kind of mantra, a kind of shibboleth in ACT politics, that there have been some dreadful examples of planning in Canberra, and Kingston is the best example of how badly the system - - -

Ms McRae: It is not. I like Kingston. Go away. People who live there like it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed, Mr Speaker, I agree with Ms McRae. I think Kingston is much maligned. I certainly feel very much for the people who live in Kingston who are constantly being pointed at and told, "This is a terrible example of a suburb". I think parts of Kingston are very good; other parts I am not too keen on. The point is that Kingston is held up as an example of a suburb which has failed in the planning sense. It is pointed to as an area of Canberra which has experienced intensive medium- or even high-density development on an ad hoc basis, without any strong sense of community consultation about the way the suburb should look at the end of that process of development. That, I think, is the essential criticism of what has gone on in places like Kingston. It has been ad hoc and it has happened without community involvement in how the suburb should change.

We took that criticism very seriously and we said, "We want to try to pioneer a different way of handling change within Canberra suburbs, the concept of development. Let us take a suburb in North Canberra also subject to potential pressure in the future for redevelopment, consult with the community about the way they think change should occur in their suburb, and then put forward a plan that would be a stimulus for debate about the way the suburb would look". We did that. We employed the Local Area Planning Advisory Committee which covers Ainslie, No. 2, and we took the awareness guidelines that they had developed in respect of their area. We used that to develop a plan with a very high degree of care. It was a very comprehensive plan. It was a notional plan about the way in which the suburb might look in, say, 30 or 40 years' time, for argument's sake, if development interest in that suburb was sustained and development was channelled in particular directions rather than on an ad hoc basis.

The resulting plan that is the subject of today's motion was put before the people of Ainslie a few weeks ago and attracted a considerable amount of criticism. I think that is fairly obvious. It appears, Mr Speaker, that the Achilles heel in that process was the degree of detail that the plan went into about how the suburb might look. It generated a comment, which stuck in my memory, by one particular resident who said,

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