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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 3940 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

"So much work has gone into this plan that there is no way that the Government is not going to implement it. It must be what the Government wants, because they have spent so much time and effort on it". That is a very disappointing comment. Comments like it have disappointed those people in the Planning Authority and in the ACT Housing Trust who have worked very hard on that exercise in the last few months. I can assure the Assembly and the community that it was never the intention of the Government that this plan should be anything other than a notional way in which the suburb might look, and anything more than a stimulus for debate about how issues like that should be handled in the ACT community, particularly in Ainslie.

There are other ways in which this could have been done. I concede that. I think we have to concede that there are potential flaws in other ways that it might have been handled. For example, the Government simply could have said, "Here is the sort of thing that could happen in Ainslie. Here is an example of what a block of townhouses might look like somewhere in Ainslie", or "Here is an example of the development criteria that would apply in Ainslie. What do you think about that? Where should they go?", and so on. Mr Speaker, my experience of that kind of exercise being applied in the past, and it has been, is that people tend not to form any firm view about these things until they see them in a concrete form, until they see the concept next to or across the road from their own house, or down the street from where they live. Those sorts of concepts are readily available in the Territory Plan and in the guidelines made under the plan. You can see what can happen in your suburb already by going and consulting those documents. People in Ainslie can already do that. But, clearly, that is not very helpful to them. It would not make much sense to them to work out that they could be ringed by medium-density townhouses if, in fact, they do not expect that to occur through any process that is going to affect their particular residential area.

Mr Speaker, I think it made more sense, and I defend the argument, to say, "Look, there is no particular way in which the suburb might be developed; but, if you were to accept the premise that you had some measure of medium-density development, here is one way it could occur. Here is an idea for the suburb. You might not like it. We might have to go and change it all. It might be entirely different from the way that the people of Ainslie would like to see it at the end of the day, but here it is as an idea". That is what we did, Mr Speaker, and it clearly antagonised a lot of people, and I accept that.

There is one important point to make in this debate which I hope the Greens, particularly, are prepared to acknowledge. It may be fair enough to object to the particular plan that has been put forward and argue against it, but it is quite another thing to say to the people of Ainslie that their suburb essentially will be unchanged from the one that exists now; that it is a suburb that will not be subject to redevelopment proposals or pressures in the future. Anyone who says that is perpetrating a great deception on those people. The deception is the suggestion that this plan is about creating the opportunity for medium-density development in Ainslie. It is not. That opportunity exists right now.

Someone could walk into the Planning Authority with a proposal to build any one of those developments that are outlined in that plan in Ainslie and say, "I want to go ahead and build that". They would have the right to do so, subject to it being acceptable in terms of the Territory Plan. Most of what is in that plan now is acceptable pursuant to the Territory Plan. That, Mr Speaker, is exactly what happened in Kingston.

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