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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (11 March) . . Page.. 605 ..

MS TUCKER

My intention is not to continue the debate from yesterday regarding the independence of this study, or to reflect on the debate in May of last year on whether the Assembly supports rural residential development. Today, I want specifically to examine the contents of this paper to see whether it really addresses the aims of the document which are stated at the beginning - to investigate the potential for rural residential development in the ACT and the identification of possible suitable sites. I should like to point out, though, that the debate in May of last year was primarily about the proposed rural residential development at Hall/Kinlyside and occurred before this discussion paper was released.

Now that we have this discussion paper that goes into the issue in more depth and describes the application of rural residential development from an ACT-wide perspective, it is legitimate for the Assembly to take the time to consider the issue of rural residential development again. I am not really concerned whether, at this point in the discussion, it is called an independent study or it is just called ACT Liberal Party policy. I am not involved in that part of the discussion. I am critiquing this document at the moment to see whether it does the job that it says it was supposed to do.

Firstly, there are a number of parts of the discussion paper where it appears that the conclusions do not match the text. For example, on page 5 the report says that this study has identified that there is a demand for rural residential development in the ACT, but when you look at the relevant section of the report there is no clear analysis of such a demand. In fact, the report says that there is already a substantial supply of land in the rural residential market in the surrounding region, with a 10-year supply in the pipeline. The report says that rural residential development in the ACT would be competing directly for the same market. In fact, the paper talks about how to create a demand for rural residential development in the ACT by offering a market niche of fully-serviced blocks.

While the executive summary states that the ACT and subregion planning strategy did not propose any rural residential development for the ACT, it did not say that it was inappropriate. That is a rather peculiar interpretation of the regional planning strategy. On page 12 of the report there is a contrasting description of the regional strategy. It states that the strategy was premised on the basis that rural residential development was not expected to be provided in the ACT. That is because relevant land in the ACT has been set aside for the expansion of Canberra or is already being used for rural purposes. The strategy recommended avoiding the proliferation of rural smallholdings outside designated areas by limiting and clustering growth around specific nodes and integrating rural residential development into existing settlement patterns.

What the Government is proposing in the discussion paper is completely at odds with the regional planning strategy. In fact, the focus of this paper is not on meeting an existing demand for rural residential development in the ACT, but on how we can out-compete the surrounding New South Wales region in the supply of rural residential land. That is totally contrary to how we should be relating to the surrounding region. Surely, the whole point of the ACT and subregion strategy was to develop a cooperative approach to development in the region to provide for the most efficient use of the land and to avoid negative environmental impacts.

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