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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2575 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

a variety of people. As well as the retail shops, there are a number of professional offices that employ people. There are also other employment centres in Curtin. In some cases, people prefer to use Curtin because of its ease of access and because of certain types of stores that are there. You may recall that early in the year Robert Macklin suggested in the Canberra Times that the Curtin Milk Bar and Pizza had the best breakfast in the ACT. I think he gave it a score of about nine out of 10, which is a very high score from Mr Macklin.

The centre is well known throughout Canberra. It is also, because of its age, suffering from an amount of degradation to the fabric of the centre. This somehow relates to the present style of shopping centres, which in some cases is not seen as the best style. It is also a case of no, or very little, upgrading money being spent for quite a number of years, and this has concerned the traders. If you look at some of the actions of the traders, you will see that, in fact, they have continued to upgrade their stores. Recently the newsagent moved to the old post office and combined the newsagency and the post office into one shop. Quite extensive upgrading and renovation was carried out at that time, at much expense to the owner of the newsagency. For those of you who are not familiar with the centre, Coles moved into where the newsagency was and spent money on setting up a new liquor store there. Coles have extended their shopping area, with the loss of the liquor store from its previous position. Coles is a store that is also interested in keeping up with the times and is continuing to upgrade. You can look at some of the other stores in that precinct and see the same action from those retailers.

The retailers feel that they are not getting any assistance from the Government to look at the public areas. If you walk through the centre, there are a number of broken bricks; there is unevenness in the bricks; the public toilets at the back are horrific and are very difficult to access if you are older or if you have children in strollers or prams; and there have been some problems with the rubbish collection, which I understand have been addressed. But there is no money being spent, except for a certain amount that was spent in 1991. Understandably, some of the traders are quite concerned about the fact that a number of other group centres and other smaller shopping centres have appeared on the upgrade list for precinct management in the last two budgets; but the Curtin shopping precinct has failed to appear in any of the budgets, despite requests to the Minister for Urban Services on this matter.

There is also another serious part of this. As well as the traders being concerned about access to the shopping centre, a number of the users of the shopping centre have had accidents. If you look at Curtin and the major areas that draw on Curtin, you will note the age of the population. A number of people living in Curtin are still the original home owners. That goes for Hughes, Garran and other suburbs in that area. A number of these people, naturally, after this time, are ageing. There are also a number of aged care facilities in the immediate area. Brindabella Gardens has a hostel and a nursing home, and St Andrew's Village is nearby in Hughes. There are a number of older people who have moved into the area as well because of the types of facilities. They use Curtin because of its convenience and the variety of stores. But they are nervous about using it, because of the unevenness of the pavement.

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