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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4728 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

It is quite interesting to consider that the proposed spin-off of the development of the car park will be the enhancement of Palmerston Lane into a major pedestrian thoroughfare. The existing Woolworths site forms the entry point and major boundary to Palmerston Lane and its value will obviously be increased by the enhancements to Palmerston Lane. Does this mean, then, that yet another shopping mall will be proposed for this site, to take advantage of its location? The character of Manuka would certainly be further degraded by this possibility.

Apart from the direct impacts on Manuka, there could be many other shops in the surrounding local centres that could be forced to close by this proposal. A supermarket of this size, able to trade up to 24 hours, must surely draw trade away from local centres in Deakin, Griffith, Hughes, Kingston, Narrabundah, Red Hill, Yarralumla and the Fyshwick markets. The Ibecon study showed quite clearly that there is an oversupply of retail space in Central Canberra which, by its definition, included South Canberra. An additional shopping mall in Manuka can only make the situation worse for the local shops in the area and worse for existing shops in Manuka.

The Government is being very hypocritical in promoting this expanded supermarket in Manuka, because it is setting up a retail battle in South Canberra that is merely repeating the retail battle between the town centres and the local shops that the Government claimed to have resolved through its retail trading hours legislation. It is quite clear to me that the Government has not considered all the implications of this proposal. The Government's own retail policy contains an evaluation check list for major retail development applications which is meant to be used as a guide in the assessment of major proposals. The list of criteria is quite comprehensive, but I have seen no evidence that the Government has used its own check list to evaluate this proposal.

Until now it has been a very closed process with no formal opportunity for public input. The decision has already been taken by the Government to proceed with this development, and once the preferred developer is chosen there is virtually nothing that can be done by the public to stop this process. Only belatedly has the Government said that it will make the bids open for public inspection and hold one workshop to gather community opinion on the plans. This is not the same as allowing the public to comment on and formally object to the whole notion of this development as well as giving the public the opportunity also to come up with possible solutions or options for car parking and dealing with Palmerston Lane.

If the winning bid conforms to the Territory Plan there will be no appeal rights available to the public. The Minister says that there will be a mandatory preliminary assessment of the proposal that is chosen by the Minister and that the public will have a chance to comment on this. But, surely, this will be too late. The decision on what will go on the site will already have been made by the Minister. If the Government really wants to follow the intent of the environmental assessment part of the Land Act it should undertake its own preliminary assessment of its decision to sell off the car park for other uses and evaluate alternative uses of the site as part of this preliminary assessment.

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