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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 244 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Corbell has mentioned this matter to my office. They are looking into it. But anyone who has an agreement should honour it.

Deakin oval

MS TUCKER: My question is directed to the Minister for Urban Services, Mr Smyth, or perhaps to Mr Humphries if he wants to take it over. It is a follow-up to the question I asked on Tuesday about the redevelopment of the Deakin soccer oval. Unless I missed it, Mr Smyth, I do not think you have replied to my question on Tuesday, which you took on notice.

Mr Smyth: No, I have not.

MS TUCKER: Mr Humphries might like to take this question over, because it has to do with him as well. At the Save Our Open Space Rally held in Civic Square last November Mr Humphries sought to allay community fears that the government wanted to develop open space around Canberra by announcing that the government was only pursuing urban infill on land that was already zoned for residential use under the Territory Plan, with two exceptions-the Yarralumla Brickworks and the old Griffith school. This seems to contradict what you agreed to in the redevelopment of the Deakin soccer oval. As part of the overall redevelopment plan, the soccer club is proposing to redevelop part of its old lease for 24 residential units on land that is currently open space on the edge of the existing oval. This land is zoned for restricted access recreation and is public land.

This part of the redevelopment will require a variation to the Territory Plan to rezone this land as residential. This proposal is quite clearly contrary to Mr Humphries' statement at the rally, so will you now withdraw from your agreement with the Croatia Deakin Football Club to facilitate the development of these units on the oval site, or does it mean that your statement at that rally should be regarded as a non-core promise?

MR HUMPHRIES: I will take that question. Before I made that statement to the rally in October or November, I asked for advice from Planning and Land Management and from Asset Management within what is now Mr Smyth's area of responsibility about those areas of the territory for which development proposals had been considered and which were designated urban open space. My advice then was that there were two significant areas covered by that description. They were the brickworks site at Yarralumla and the site of the old primary school in Griffith. My advice was that there was no urban open space affected by the proposal at Deakin. On that basis, I made that commitment to the ACT community.

MS TUCKER: So we have contradictory advice. My supplementary question is: could you also explain why the government gave the football club $220,000 as compensation when the club gave up its lease for that part of its block that will become a public park, when the club had publicly admitted that the improvements on this part of the block were in poor condition and not wanted by the club and would be demolished anyway as part of the development of the public park and when the whole block had been transferred from the ACT Soccer Federation to the Croatia Deakin Football Club in 1998 for only $133,000?

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