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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 4483 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

Earlier today I heard Mr Humphries talking about the Telstra sale and how good that will be for the environment and how good that will be for Landcare. Mr Humphries, you need to understand that Landcare is also about water care and about bush care. There are real issues about the watertable on this site and the Ginninderra catchment generally. I think you need to go back and take a good look at those issues and perhaps listen to the people who do have concerns. I do not think you have taken those issues on very seriously as Minister for the Environment. Perhaps you could take off your Planning Minister's cap, at least for five minutes, and put on your Environment Minister's cap, because I think there are issues there that you have neglected to look at.

MR MOORE (4.20): As chair of the Planning and Environment Committee, I have taken quite some interest in this issue. I have been approached by a large number of people in Belconnen from the soccer side of things and also residents who are setting out to protect their amenity. One factor that cannot be missed, and is not missed by any of those people, is that the site was originally set out and signposted to be used as a sporting facility. To be fair to everybody there, I do not think anybody is debating that. What is being debated is the size. What happened in the initial instance was that many people believed that the proposal was going to be a proposal to cater for in the order of 12,000 people. What has been made very clear, as part of the negotiations, is that that has been reduced to 6,000 people. There is a concern there in regard to protecting residential amenity.

Our committee has expressed that same concern on a number of occasions. Our leasing system in the past has not been able to protect an area because of its failure to police leasehold. This is an issue that we have raised with the Minister on a number of occasions in our reports. I guess there is still a concern there. There are also a number of other concerns about the proposed development, but nobody that I am aware of is saying that the site should not be developed. I just heard Ms Horodny say in her speech that she also is not saying that. It is a question of scale and how it is developed. The committee, in dealing with this, decided not to take the issue on for consideration but rather to write to the Minister prior to a time when we would consider taking it on. We decided to write to the Minister and say, "These are the concerns that have been raised with us. What is your response to these concerns?". Today Mr Humphries has drawn our attention to the way those concerns have been addressed. He was kind enough this morning to distribute to members a response to the issues raised in correspondence to the Planning and Environment Committee, and I appreciate that.

When I looked through that response over lunchtime I felt that we were going to achieve very little extra by having the committee now take this issue on for consideration. Ms Horodny has raised a number of issues, some of which I agree with and some of which I disagree with. If we were to take it on, I believe that all we would be doing is creating a false hope for members of the community. I had the same view, I must say, with reference to the Chisholm Revival Centre church. I had some concerns about whether it was out of scale with the surrounding suburban areas. In the end I felt that, if the committee took it on, we would create a false hope that there was going to be a different outcome, and we would put the community through a great deal of anguish in raising issues that already had been raised. Referring particularly to McKellar, these concerns already have been dealt with by the Minister. All that creating false hopes does is extend the agony, and I am not prepared to be part of that.

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