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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 133 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Those reports - and there were, in total, something like a dozen of them over a period of 20 years - point ineluctably to the conclusion that Canberra is going to need a road in approximately that position to meet the requirements of the people of Gungahlin. With great respect to the people who brought forward those various reports, I have to say that conclusion is fairly well inescapable; in fact, so much so that it is my view that, after all those previous reports, those who say that we can do without that road really have the onus placed on them to demonstrate clearly to the community what the alternatives are, what the magical formula is, that will avoid the need to build a road of that kind in that place.

I met with the Conservation Council and some other people from related organisations last week, and I said to them that I was very much open-minded about receiving indications of that kind, an examination of what alternatives might be there. That remains my position. If it can be demonstrated to me that there is a reasonable case for an alternative, then I will look at it long and hard and I will take appropriate steps to address that before any decision is taken to commit ourselves to a parkway. But let me just run through some of the arguments I believe militate against there being an option of that kind. There were arguments raised by Ms Horodny. She criticised the Government, for example, for not generating employment in the Gungahlin township so as to obviate the need for people to travel outside the town centre. On the face of it, that is a reasonable argument, and one might well ask what the Government is doing to generate employment there.

This Assembly has debated in the past the question of what should have happened with the then Department of the Environment, Land and Planning, the now Planning and Land Management Group, and where it should have been appropriately housed and located. But let us, for argument's sake, say that, magically, it was possible now to shift that organisation to Gungahlin. Suppose the building in Dickson fell down tomorrow and we had to find a home for them; and we decided, "Right; Gungahlin is the place for them to go". There are about 400 people who work in that building. If we relocated to Gungahlin we would obviously be encouraging people who are now working in that building to live in Gungahlin. But if we did so we would be very much struggling against the pattern of previous use of employment bases elsewhere in this city. Recently research has confirmed that about two-thirds of people working in Belconnen and Tuggeranong live in the same locality. That, of course, reduces to some extent the need for cross-city travel. However, the proportion of workers able to find a job in their own town ranges between a high of 30 per cent in Belconnen and a low of only 17 per cent in Tuggeranong.

Even assuming that we achieved the best result in evidence elsewhere in Canberra and 30 per cent of the people working in PALM were to live in Gungahlin if PALM were relocated there, we would have a total saving in terms of journeys out of and into Gungahlin each day of approximately 120. When the township is finished there are going to be 100,000 people living there. We can assume that about half of them wish to make journeys to work each day. Therefore, 120 journeys saved out of a total number of journeys each day of perhaps 40,000 would have a very small impact on the need for that road. Even if we found, magically, several large organisations which would operate in Gungahlin, clearly it would not produce the desired result.

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