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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3419 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

The amendment does not include other key players in the debate. For instance, it does not include any reference to the people who are in charge of the consultancy. Who is in charge of the consultancy? Is it Planning and Land Management? No. Is it the Minister for Urban Services? Well, only indirectly. And certainly it is not the Yarralumla Residents Association.

The amendment does not include the infrastructure and asset management area of the Department of Urban Services. They are the people who have commissioned the consultants. Where are they? Quite clearly, they are just as important. Those officers are the ones who have been at the meetings. They are the officers who had to break up the shouting matches that occurred at the last meeting. They are not people from PALM.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MR CORBELL: Where is the Chief Minister's Department? Members would recall-I am sure that if they were not present they would have seen it on the TV or reported in the papers-that senior officers of the Chief Minister's Department were also present at the meeting and put forward their views about this strategic project for the territory.

I think those two omissions alone show that this proposal does not appear, on the face of it, to have been fully thought out, and the Labor Party is not prepared to support the amendment at this time. What we need is a process in which the community has confidence. We need to ensure that any decision that the government makes, informed by that process, is seen to have legitimacy. The current one does not. It should be stopped and a genuine process commenced.

MR RUGENDYKE (5.01): I will speak briefly on this subject. I must say that until the news reports of the fight I had not particularly followed the progress of this proposed development. And that is all it can be described as-a fight over heritage land in the ACT, a fight over buffer zones, a fight over broadacre plots, a fight over restricted access to recreation areas.

It is apparent to me from watching those news reports and from what I have heard here today that the consultancy seems to have been a failure. As the minister says, a vast amount of money has been spent on these consultants and it would appear it is a rip-off. But we live with that sort of thing. We see other consultancies that seem to be a rip-off. It worries me that these consultants make such an amount of money with these flawed processes.

The television footage of the fight contained the comment "Look, here's the referee." The referee was called in to separate the combatants and I must say he did a very good job. But it is a flawed process. Indeed, the comment was made on the news that if it was a fair dinkum process they would at least have put forward the option of no redevelopment. I totally agree that it was a blank sheet.

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