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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4077 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

This project will have an adverse effect on the annual turnover and viability of Kingston, Narrabundah and Red Hill. The other six centres in the Manuka District will lose $5m as a result of other already approved developments and will lose an additional $6m if Manuka Plaza is built making the actual loss in annual trade about $11m (Kingston - $3.9m., Griffith - $1.8m., Red Hill - $0.8, Narrabundah - $0.6m., Deakin - $1.8m., Yarralumla - $2.4m.

This is apparently okay. The Greens do not think it is okay. The Greens think it is actually a very serious situation that we are allowing such development to occur in a climate in which we continually hear rhetoric in this town about supporting small business; acknowledging the employment potential of small business; acknowledging that it is through small business that we will get diversity and greater employment and, in fact, that it is the backbone of Australia.

But, more and more, we see this compromised by the rhetoric of competition. We know that the level playing field does not exist. We know that open competition is about giving big businesses the opportunity. Obviously, they have competitive advantages because of economies of scale and so on. We know that that is the result. But we do not see this being addressed when we also hear the language about the small businesses being so important to our society. When you look at this evaluation, you see what it will do to those smaller centres. It could be the end of some of those centres, because they are already not doing very well.

I repeat that this development of shopping malls is being done in a policy vacuum. There have been regular calls, inside and outside this Assembly, for a strategic plan to guide Canberra's development, to replace the ad hoc developer-driven planning that is currently occurring. I recognise that the Government has been working on a strategic plan; but progress on this has been very slow. The way we are seeing development occur - it is happening now, of course, with the Griffin Centre - is that we are being told that, somehow, if a developer comes in with an idea for totally rebuilding a large area of our city, that is fine. But what I want to know is why we, as a community, do not decide that we would like to see that large area of the city redeveloped - such as the ROCKS area, such as the Griffin Centre area, such as was decided about the Kingston foreshore. They are all totally different kinds of processes. We do not have any consistency at all in this town.

If we, as a community, decide that we want to redevelop these large areas of the city, why not bring in the community, as happened at Kingston, to have input with planning officials and so on, to work out what sort of development would meet the needs of the ACT? Then we could offer to anyone who is interested the opportunity to see how they would meet those requirements with a plan. That was fantastic in Kingston. Why do we have this other process, which seems to be given equal weight, where we have just one person coming in and then we have the job of arguing with that particular developer about fiddling around the edges, as is happening at the ROCKS? The developer says to the community sector, "If you are really good, you will get this amount of space; but your input has to be made within, say, six or eight weeks". That is not how it should be working at all. It really is no wonder that the community is getting extremely frustrated with the processes as they are occurring right now in the ACT.

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