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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3687 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

the government does not support a change to the policies applying to group and local centres that would require all residential development in those centres to comply with all aspects of the control and design and siting codes applying to residential areas.

The centres, as I have pointed out already, are not residential. Such a change is unnecessary and it is undesirable in terms of the consequences it would produce. We need to protect our commercial centres and encourage them to provide as wide a range of facilities and services as possible to the surrounding community. At the same time, we want to encourage more people to live within and around our centres. However, this latter objective should not be at the expense of the fundamental reason for providing land for commercial development.

For these reasons the government opposes the motion. However, it will instruct Planning and Land Management to review the lease and development conditions for the blocks referred to in order to make sure that they contain the appropriate references to the relevant requirements of the code.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the release of such sites is carefully considered. The sites in both Kaleen and Giralang are considered suitable for housing built to adaptable and accessible standards. The release will allow people to obtain housing close to facilities without having to leave their existing local areas. In fact, the Kaleen site was identified as a site for older person's housing in the government's July statement on older person's initiatives. To delay or withdraw sites such as these will deny the government's ability to meet the community's demand for such sites as demographic changes drive the need for different types of accommodation.

The passage of this motion will also undermine the implementation of master planning work recently undertaken, involving extensive community consultation in places as diverse as Macgregor and Kambah local centres, for which there is strong community support. The passage of the motion would also delay further, and may even compromise, the release of the Nicholls local centre site which is being eagerly awaited by the local community.

Mr Deputy Speaker, it is considered that the careful mix of residential use in commercial centres will lead to more sustainable and vibrant community facilities, and enable community concerns about failing or failed centres to be addressed. The government will be opposing the motion.

MS TUCKER (9.03), in reply: I am happy to explain to Mr Rugendyke in particular. He wanted me to explain more fully, and obviously I need to clarify a couple of misunderstandings for Mr Hird. He was quite excited at the time that he was speaking so I did not want to deal with it at that point. Hopefully he has settled down a bit now. He seemed to be under the impression that the Greens had opposed every development. I think I heard Mr Stefaniak say that too. That is actually misleading the house. It shows me that Mr Stefaniak does not understand the land act. As Mr Corbell said, it is very worrying that Mr Hird has been chairing the Planning and Urban Services Committee, considering some of the statements he made. For Mr Stefaniak's information as well, we do not deal with most medium-density developments in this house. They mostly just occur. The ones that come up here are usually contentious-

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