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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3420 ..

MR RUGENDYKE (continuing):

So while I have sympathy with Ms Tucker's motion, I think that, given the vast amount of money that has been spent, it would be inappropriate to abandon the current public consultation process. I think it would be more appropriate to allow that flawed process to continue to its conclusion and then look at what the report says.

I am not sure whether Mr Moore's amendment is a reasonable compromise. Ms Tucker approached me and suggested that she be given the opportunity to ring around Yarralumla Residents Association members in particular to see if she could identify anyone who may have agreed with this amendment. I think it is appropriate to give Ms Tucker the opportunity to do that. If need be, I will support a motion that the debate be adjourned to allow her to do that. However, it would be inappropriate to rush consideration of this matter. My initial intention was to not support the motion but to have a look at the amendment, which seemed to be a compromise, and I will do that.

I should mention that, irrespective of what happens to this flawed process, changes to the Territory Plan for residential and other land uses will come before the urban services committee as draft variations to the Territory Plan. That will be the appropriate forum in which to discuss any changes to existing uses. That is where residential could be knocked on the head if that is seen to be inappropriate.

MR SMYTH (Minister for Urban Services) (5.07): I will take the opportunity to speak to Ms Tucker's motion in order to correct a few misrepresentations that these debates always suffer from.

Where did we start with in regard to this proposal? Was it the government that came up with the idea? No, unfortunately it was not. In this case it was a joint proposal put to the government by a group from the Yarralumla Residents Association and the Burley Griffin Local Area Planning Advisory Committee. I know that some in the current management of the Yarralumla Residents Association have a different view of that but members of the YRA helped put together in July 1999 the Burley Griffin Local Area Planning Advisory Committee report entitled Approaches to Conservation and Development of the Old Canberra Brickworks and Environs. So this is where we started from.

In terms of consultation, this is the document put to us by the community that we started working with under the assumption that that is where the community wanted to start. This is the work that a group of people had put together and it seemed a reasonable point from which to start. We did not start with the blank sheet that Mr Corbell spoke about. Two groups with a mandate to represent the views and concerns of their local community came to us with their idea. We thought the idea was reasonable and we thought it was reasonable to work out how to progress something that might come from that. That was the starting point. I can show members the copy of the document if they want to see it.

Representatives of the group sought a meeting with the previous Chief Minister-I attended as well-and presented the report. A central tenet of the report is that the brickworks buildings themselves and their immediate environs are not to be covered with residential, commercial and/or tourist uses; they are instead to be preserved and interpreted as an archaeological heritage in a way that enhances the ability to tell the

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