Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4872 ..

Mr Moore: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Can you just clarify for us at what time Mr Osborne is back in?

MR SPEAKER: He has a minute to go. The question is: That clause 5 be agreed to.

Mr Moore: Mr Speaker, before you put the question, I think Ms McRae is on her feet.

Mr Kaine: Can I move that the motion - whatever it was - be put, Mr Speaker?

Ms McRae: No. I want to speak. Do not do that to me. I have just been gratuitously insulted for the last three hours. Here is my big opportunity, Mr Kaine.

MR SPEAKER: Proceed, Ms McRae.

MS McRAE (8.31): Mr Speaker, I want to speak about the abolition of the Territory planner and take us back to the paper that Mr Humphries presented to the Assembly in March 1996, in which he announced exactly what was going to happen and why this legislation is being contemplated tonight. Whilst I can understand why Mr Moore and others are anxious about there not being a statutory planner, let me begin by saying that, even though the ACT has had statutory planners, and lots of very capable ones, it is not quite the perfect city that Mr Moore would like us to believe in. I do not think that any statutory planner would go around saying, "Wow! Have we not done the most fantastic job in the Belconnen Town Centre?". I do not think that having that on their CV would take them very far.

I could list other things that you could quite easily label as mistakes, oversights and slight glitches that perhaps statutory planners or any sorts of planners would prefer had not ended up the way they did. That is not to say that I do not share Mr Moore's, the Government's and everybody else's pride in our planned city. It is certainly a very comfortable city to live in. It certainly has yielded a great deal of comfort and community life for people who live here and has yielded a quality of life unmatched in other places. But I do not think the Territory is perfect and I do not think the simple keeping of a statutory planner's role or a chief planner's role is going to achieve the quality outcomes that we seek to achieve.

I think you can mount a case that the level of planning that we have had has been excellent, but it has not necessarily proved the case that an independent statutory planner is going to yield a good city. You cannot mount a case that the abolition of this position is also going to produce a good outcome for the ACT. What we need is what I said before. We need to know where we are going, how we are going to get there, who is responsible and who gets in the way of the outcomes that we want. To go back to the paper that Mr Humphries presented to us in March 1996, I want to read out exactly what is going to happen, so that I can banish all thought that suddenly we are in a planner-free zone. No matter what Mr Humphries and I might collude to do, the ACT will never be rid of a Territory Plan, a Land Act and the entire process of planning and land and lease management that we have so carefully put in place. No matter what scaremongering is going on about the dire consequences for the future, let me assure all

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .