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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4089 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

as if nobody is able to think about more than one thing at a time. What I have found in all the processes that have been undertaken is that people do, in fact, think about at least three things at one time, if not more. They are quite capable of thinking of the whole of Canberra, of thinking of their personal needs, of thinking of Manuka and of thinking of the future.

The responses we have seen have demonstrated the wide range of quite complicated and interesting arguments that people have put and their capacity to understand Canberra very well without legislators sitting down and mapping it out and saying, "Today we will build a community centre. Tomorrow we will build an aged care centre. The social plan demands that the next day we take care of one-legged people". For heaven's sake, people are quite capable of personal involvement, of political involvement and of social involvement where they are feeding this information to us and the social fabric of this society changes. We will not be opposing that, because it does not hurt to have a bit of a public think about these things; but I really do question whether it is going to yield us any results and whether the implicit assumption that somehow the community views would have stopped Manuka would have gone ahead.

What I find overwhelmingly pleasing about this project is that I can defend the public process. One of our roles as legislators that I take very seriously is the establishment of rules, laws, regulations and processes whereby people can feel confident that their opinions are taken into account, that they are weighed up seriously, that they are counted with information which goes to the Minister and usually to the Assembly as well, and are then given a cold-headed assessment and final decisions are made on that basis. What I feel that we have been progressively working towards in the nine years since self-government is depoliticising the planning process and developing mechanisms by which community views are well incorporated into the process and are taken account of before decisions are made. I am very confident that this has been done exceptionally well.

Ms Tucker took exception to the fact that the original idea that was accepted by the Minister was not the absolute black-and-white letter written down in this PA. She missed the point entirely. What is brilliant about this PA is that, from the preliminary assessment, we already know that this is a developer that is in tune with the community, that has already heard about everything that has gone on on radio and in newspapers and letters and has been said in public meetings. Even before the development application has begun, even in the preliminary assessment when he could have just cold-headedly put in what the original proposal was, the developer has already amended and stepped back. That has given me a great deal of faith that we are going to end up with something that is in harmony with what the people are asking for.

In the original proposal, as we heard it, what were some of the things that people were talking about as being very much of concern? The parking problem was one. What has the proponent done in the PA? He has increased the number of parking spaces, taking into account what people were saying. He has gone from 625 to 672. What has he done about the shops? He has listened to the retailers. He has not said, "Too bad; let the market rip. We want to build X number of small shops and you can sink or swim".

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