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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1885 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

I note that there is some inconsistency in the whole draft variation about where you can and cannot build adaptable housing. After discussions with the minister there was general agreement that this should be looked at in a future draft variation. But if this motion succeeds today, there would not be the same pressure to do that immediately.

Turning to Kippax, I ask the Assembly to do a very similar thing: to excise a very small piece of land from the draft variation so that it would revert to its previous use. Until the draft variation was made, section 53 in Kippax was precinct "b" commercial, but the variation recently made by the minister converts it to precinct "a" and therefore increases its value. This matter is of some concern to many of my constituents in West Belconnen.

The Kippax group centre in West Belconnen seems to be the ugly duckling of group centres in the ACT. West Belconnen has a great pent-up need for community facilities. The people of West Belconnen, led by the Kippax task force, have been lobbying successive governments for 12 years now to turn their temporary library into a permanent library. No-one comes out of this with any good grace or looking well. This seems to have been too difficult for successive governments, and it seems to be too difficult for this government.

Mr Wood was talking about the Kippax library on the radio the other day. What he said seemed to typify the lack of will and people just not knowing what to do with Kippax. Quite frankly, this has gone on long enough, and it is not good enough. Mr Woods said on ABC radio:

I think there's been a period when the library wasn't always definite. It's now for some time been definite, so there will be a library there. The temporary building is certainly not suitable, and a permanent building will be erected. The decision was made some time ago in principle for a permanent library at Kippax. There are problems around where it will be. There is a planning process that my colleague Simon Corbell has been running. It has been confused by different parties at Kippax with different proposals. The planning for the library has got out of control, but that's the planning side of it.

There is a long explanation by Mr Wood saying, "Yes, you can have a library, but the Kippax people might have to wait another five or six years." Quite frankly, I would like to draw a line in the sand and say, "No, the Kippax people cannot wait another five or six years."

When I speak about the pent-up demand for community facilities, I do not mean just for a library. I was in conversation with the Belconnen Community Centre at the Bridges bowling function that some of my colleagues and I attended recently. The staff of the Belconnen Community Centre told me that they had a desperate demand for community facilities in West Belconnen because people, especially those with disabilities, found it difficult to make their way from Holt, MacGregor, Latham and places like that to the Belconnen Community Centre. Seeing there is a group centre there, West Belconnen would be ideally situated to providing appropriate community facilities.

Added to that, last Wednesday at a meeting of the West Belconnen LAPAC, members voted unanimously to ask this government to re-institute the master planning process for Kippax that had been stalled and make a commitment now to building the library. They

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