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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4630 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Before anybody else was talking about strategic planning, in 1992 I launched an election platform fundamentally based on strategic planning. I am going to quote a few bits from that election platform:

Strategic Planning should be a central function of the ACT Government.

... ... ...

This strategy should set the social priorities of the community.

. There will be an overall strategic plan for the Territory, encompassing a vision for Canberra and the ACT to the year 2020 ...

. Government actions, whether as entrepreneurs, facilitators, service providers or regulators, will be directed by the objectives of the strategic plan.

I went on to say:

Strategic planning is an holistic approach to the development of a city and its hinterland.

Then I set out how I saw strategic planning. That was taken up in the 2020 report. There is a description of how to do strategic planning on page 8 of the report to the Legislative Assembly for the Australian Capital Territory from the Government at the time. It actually tells you how to do it. Was it done that way? No; we had an entirely different method of going about it. Why did we have an entirely different method? You thought you would be smart and get Liberal Party ideology up instead and use it as an excuse to say, "This is our strategic plan". You are trying to move along Liberal Party ideology instead of moving the whole of the Assembly with you in a participatory process.

That election platform was not the end of it. You may recall, Mr Speaker, that my colleague Helen Szuty put a motion to the Assembly which resulted in the two excellent documents, Canberra 2020: Vision for Prosperity and Choosing Our Future. The Government's response was adopted by the Assembly as a whole, because it was the style of document that could be. To develop a strategic plan really only required as the next step a statement on how you would go about implementing that. This Government could not do that.

While they were sitting around thinking about it, the Planning and Environment Committee, after we encouraged them to do it, said, "We are not going to wait for this whole-of-government strategic plan. We have to have in place at least a subsection of that on a strategy for urban development within Canberra". The Chief Minister is quite right in saying that it is a subsection. Not too long after the committee had announced that that was the process they were going to use and the path they were going to go down, the Chief Minister with, as I recall it, Mr Howe, the then Deputy Prime Minister,

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