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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4624 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Planning in the ACT is not a new thing. Planning in the ACT is something we have had with us for a very long time. Planning has always been integral to the development of strategic plans which look ahead to the short term and the medium term. "Every five years" is the common language. The message of Stein and the message of the 2020 reports is that every five years we need to go back and have another look at our strategic planning, to ensure that we are moving in the right directions, to set a course, to decide what we are going to do next.

I want to take a minute to highlight some of the major themes in planning in the ACT which have been the subject of consensus in this place and in the Canberra community for some time. These are themes that we as an Assembly and the community as a whole have agreed to in the past: Canberra's continued development in the form of separate towns, each with a town centre; the introduction of measures of facility urban consolidation; the maintenance of a hierarchy of commercial centres where Civic is the dominant business, retail, entertainment, cultural and tourist centre; decentralisation of employment opportunities; location of industrial areas generally on the fringe of towns; maintenance of a clear hierarchy of national arterial and other roads; reservation of a route for an intertown public transport system; achievement of high standards of urban design; continued protection and enhancement of the national capital open space system; planning of rural areas to provide a distinctive landscape setting for the national capital; conservation of the Territory's natural cultural heritage; maintenance and improvement of environmental quality; and provision of an essential infrastructure and careful management of natural resources, especially water, to ensure the orderly development of the national capital.

They are objectives which we as a community have again and again signed on to and which successive governments have signed on to. The purpose of strategic planning is to take those goals, most recently set out in the Territory Plan, and to map out what we are going to do next towards achieving those objectives. What are the next steps we are going to take towards achieving those objectives? In 1993 the current Government produced reports on Canberra in the year 2020. They contained a preferred future for the year 2020 and a probable future for the year 2003 - that is, 10 years after the reports were done. They talked about the need to develop strategies for moving towards those goals. This is our heritage as we come to look at the Government's so-called strategic plan. This is the consensus upon which the Government ought to be building. These are the foundation stones on which any strategic plan should be built.

The tragedy of the situation we find ourselves in today is that the Government has not produced a strategic plan at all. The Government has not built on those foundation stones of the Territory Plan or Canberra in the year 2020 project. It has not taken as its starting point that consensus. It has not mapped out the next steps we need to take towards achieving the goals which we have agreed on over the years. Instead, it has set out some short-term agendas of the current Government to meet the immediate needs of key constituencies of the Government.

Mr Speaker, a strategic plan has other characteristics. A strategic plan ought to command broad community support. One thing I can guarantee is that this plan will not command broad community support. This plan is about a contest over the resources of this city, and a highly political contest at that. A real strategic plan in the nation's capital would

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