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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4420 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

Look at some of the issues in local planning matters. If this Government cannot manage those, how would they handle anything bigger? What would happen to the hills and ridges around Canberra if Mrs Carnell got her hands on them? If you look at some of the muck-ups in planning over the last three years you will realise that this Government does not have a clue. They have made lots of noise, and it is only noise, about their consultation processes. They will tell you how many hundreds of consultations they are carrying out at any one time, but when people really want information it is not available.

I have been out this morning talking to people at Downer about what is going to happen to their oval. This is a community facility that is also part of the heritage of that area. They cannot get a straight answer out of this Government about what is going to go on that site; what sorts of facilities there will be; who is going to use the site; whether there will be lights and what sort of lights they will be; whether the lighting will take into account the planetarium, and what impact it will have. All that these people are asking for is information. All they want to find out is whether this Government has looked at the impact of making changes like that to the Downer oval. Is it too much to ask that the community be informed about what is going on in relation to planning? There are several Ministers involved with this and none of them want to tell the community out there what is going on. This is only just one example.

I attended many meetings last year when the people of Ainslie suddenly had these plans dumped on them. There had been no discussion. There had been no discussion with the LAPAC, which was a very active working group, about what plans PALM and ACT Housing were developing for Ainslie. They did not ask the people who live there. They did not ask the people who had, in some cases, lived there for a long time what they thought should be in their community. They did not ask them what changes they should make to take account of advancing years. They did not ask them what sort of heritage they wanted to keep in one of the oldest suburbs in Canberra. No, they just turned up one day with a set of plans and said, "Make a decision. Do you want it or don't you?". What a way to go about planning for a good community, for a good city - to just dump things on people and expect them to make an immediate decision, without asking the people who live in a community what they want in that community. This has been characteristic of so many things that have happened under this Government.

Obviously, with the objections that came from the people in Ainslie, they have been a bit slow about similar plans for O'Connor. But then you are left wondering whether there are things going on that no-one knows about and whether the people in O'Connor will wake up one morning to find there is a whole new planning system, a whole new arrangement as to what housing stays, what will be sold, and what height of buildings will be allowed. Will this just happen one day for the people of O'Connor? It was on the books at one stage.

This Government does not want an open planning process. They do not want benefits for all people, only for a few people in the ACT or some of their other business mates. Because of that we end up with some of the shambles that we have here. It is obvious that local planning is not working well, and it is not working in the Federal sense either. Even the Prime Minister does not like the Territory. We have to look at developing relationships; we have to look at what this Government is doing with planning.

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