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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (23 September) . . Page.. 3117 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

We were criticised on that score. I went back to Ms Horodny and said, "Time is really up, Lucy. What are you proposing to do?". She said, "Oh, I do not have any suggestions to make. I thought you were asking me to engage in consultation for you". I said, "No. I clearly wanted you to just suggest to me what I should do to follow the Greens means of achieving effective community consultation". She said, "Oh, that was not what I understood you were asking me to do".

Mr Speaker, I think it is worth noting that it is very easy for someone who sits on the crossbenches, who presumably - we do not know what will happen at the next election - will not be in government at any stage in the future, to say, "Whatever you do, Government, you get wrong". The list here seems to suggest that everything we have done as far as consultation is concerned we have got wrong. I would say to members of this place that it is much more difficult than they might think to construct an exercise in effective community consultation, particularly when we know there are going to be strong vested interests opposed to the outcome that is being suggested.

I want to make one more reference to another exercise in public consultation. The Ainslie redevelopment process is mentioned in this paper. Mr Speaker, when I came to office I was acutely aware of the problem with redevelopment of older suburbs in the city which resulted in fairly intensive proposals for medium- or high-density housing. Particularly I was told about Kingston, "Look at Kingston. All those flats and high-rises destroyed the suburb. Isn't it dreadful?". I said to PALM, "We need to think of a way of getting around these problems. How do we do that?". We sat down and very carefully worked through a very extensive process of considering how we would handle this differently in the future.

The model we developed we were going to trial in Ainslie. We were going to say to the residents of Ainslie, "Here is a way in which your suburb might be transformed over the next 20, 30, 50 years by proposals for high-density occupation. But, rather than have each application come in piecemeal, affecting each particular block separately, as individual developers come along wanting to propose things about individual blocks, let us develop now a master concept that will allow us to consider the way the entire concept would work, so that only developments that would fit in with that predetermined master plan can be proposed. You would know what the shape of the suburb would look like over a long period of time".

We developed that concept. We carefully canvassed it among some organisations. We then put it out in the public domain. It met with an understandably hostile reaction from some people, because they saw that their block was suddenly designated for high-rise and they reacted badly to that. There is no surprise in that. There is no way of breaking that kind of concept gently in the circumstances. There were members of the public out there getting agitated about it. What did the Greens do? They did not get out there and say, "Hang on! What the Government is doing here is a very sensible approach towards a longstanding or permanent problem on the ACT planning landscape". They got out there and said, "The Government is ignoring the residents of Ainslie. The Government has this all wrong. They have failed in their consultation exercise".

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