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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3367 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

So for Mr Kaine to come out now and say members were not aware of this option is simply a nonsense. It is a nonsense because the club itself asserted it in the lead-up to the Assembly's disallowance. It is a nonsense because it was put on the public record very clearly before. Nothing has changed.

What were the reasons why a majority of members in this place disallowed the draft variation? The reasons were twofold. First of all, they related to not allowing an organisation which had a concessional lease to make a windfall gain from converting that lease, through a variation to the Territory Plan, from restricted access recreation to residential. The club would have made a 25 per cent windfall gain on the improved value of the land resulting from that change-even though it had paid a minimal amount for its lease because it was granted as a concession for the purposes of running a golf club. This Assembly decided it was not going to allow that circumstance to occur, and that was the right decision.

What was the other reason that the Assembly rejected the proposal? I think you can find the other reason in the dissenting report that I appended to the majority report of the Planning and Urban Services Committee on this draft variation, and that related to the compromising of open space areas that the development would have resulted in.

The development was proposed to be placed on an unused fairway at the back, at the top of the Federal Golf Club. The golf club itself is an integral part of the open space network that connects the formal national capital open space area of Red Hill with the open space areas that move through Hughes down to Yarralumla Creek and the centre of the Woden Valley.

The golf course itself is an integral part of that open space network, and to permit a development at the very top of that area would create a physical obstruction in that area of open space from Red Hill reserve down to the bottom of the Woden Valley. That was very clearly detailed in my dissenting report, and indeed in many of the submissions made by members of the community on the issue. Those two reasons-windfall gain and loss of open space-were the two reasons that this Assembly endorsed in rejecting the draft variation. And, again, nothing has changed.

Mr Kaine asks this Assembly to say to the community, "We want you to make a decision between the option you hate a lot and the option you hate even more." That is what Mr Kaine is asking us to do today. It is not an acceptable proposition. Instead this Assembly should reassert its decision of last October and it should formally reject Mr Kaine's proposal and say instead that the club should be looking at other options in resolving its problems, rather than simply seek development.

Other options do exist, including entering into partnerships with other sporting bodies, or indeed with other licensed clubs-and a number of other sporting organisations in this town have done so over the past few years. Those are options. Another option would be to seek direct assistance from the government, and then the government would make a judgment about that. A further option, of course, is to simply pursue a commercial financing arrangement to address the infrastructure issues it has. All of those options are ones which the club should more seriously address.

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