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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4334 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

What we are buying for the community and for all those concerns is a few more months. We have asked government to come back with this variation at the beginning of the next Assembly, once the Planning and Environment Committee is established. We expect that the hearings will be reopened and that there will be evidence before that committee that a far greater level of continuing consultation has taken place and that government has paid a bit more attention to the potential status of section development plans and the impact of those on the entire suburb.

The two suburbs we were looking at in particular, Turner and Braddon, are not very big. It is quite easy to visualise a plan for the suburb, and the idea of a plan for the entire suburb, conservation and development, came from PALM. They are proposing to do a similar thing for Ainslie. They are the ones who seeded the thought that this could be done. What we saw in this variation to the Territory Plan was a range of very positive, creative and intelligent solutions to some very difficult problems; but they are half-baked. We sincerely believe that if government takes seriously what the committee has put in front of it, if government spends the time wisely over the next few months, by the time this proposal comes back to the Assembly early next year we will have a model for the management of this very tricky issue.

No-one who lives in Turner or Braddon wants to inflict this sort of uncertainty and turmoil on the rest of Canberra. What this variation is offering is a model that can then be quite easily transferred to other areas where we can already see the redevelopment pressure establishing itself, such as Dickson, Lyneham, O'Connor, and perhaps a little bit of Reid - all that inner part of Canberra - and hopefully, in my opinion, similarly around the other town centres where the urban amenity is such that a diversity of housing needs need to be met.

This variation was trying to deal with two fundamental needs. One is to offer the variety of housing that it is clear the people of Canberra want. People want to live in units, people want to live in flats, people want to live in other than single-person dwellings. On the other hand, the variation is also dealing with the development pressure nearer town centres. The committee took each of those issues seriously. The committee took on board what the community and the affected developers had to say. The committee has offered a plan that will offer a solution, as I have said before, not only to these two suburbs under pressure but also to all suburbs in the future where the pressure to have varied accommodation for older people or for single people will start to build up. These needs can then be met by properly laid out section master plans and suburban plans. I commend the report to the Assembly.

MS TUCKER (7.45): I would like to speak to this report. Ms Horodny has leave from the Assembly, but I will make some comments on behalf of the Greens. We are happy to support the committee's recommendations regarding the draft plan variation that replaces the B1 zone with the new B11 and B12 zones. I would like to remind the Assembly that the Greens first raised concerns about the B1 zone in the Assembly through our motion to abolish the B1 zone which was debated in June 1996. This motion reflected the broad concern of residents in the area about the impacts of residential development that were starting to occur in Braddon and had already occurred in Kingston.

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