Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4308 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Yes, Mr Speaker, we are all in favour of building the employment base in our town centres. We look at that as an objective, something that we should be doing, and, for the members for Molonglo who have a burgeoning town centre in Gungahlin, these are particularly high priorities, many of which will only be addressed when this government provides adequate transport into and out of Gungahlin, including the Gungahlin Drive extension, which could have been started to be built 165 days ago if the government had committed itself to the plans already undertaken by the previous government. Today, Mr Hargreaves is just exercising his version of the politics of envy.

Mr Hargreaves: I am envious of Barton all right.

MRS DUNNE: You are envious. What you are doing here today is you are creating a straw man so that it can be knocked down. You are saying here that the major development at the airport is a de facto town centre. Have we ever heard such rubbish! The next thing he is going to say is that, because lots of people work at Russell and Campbell Park, those places are de facto town centres. That is not the case. What we are seeing at the airport is a range of developments which far outstrip in quality, design and innovation anything that we are seeing in the existing town centres.

The sheer excellence of the Brindabella Business Park is an indictment of us all-of all the people who build buildings in Canberra, who advocate the building of buildings in Canberra, who oversee the planning of buildings in Canberra. I suggest that Mr Hargreaves take a tour of the area and look at the innovations there. He would then see why people want to work there and why people want to take their business there. If it were a choice between, dare I say, the Brindabella Business Park and the Z-class offices in the industrial areas of Belconnen or the industrial areas of Tuggeranong, where would you go, Mr Speaker, if you wanted to project an image of your business as a go-ahead business in the 21st century? I am afraid that you would not go to Oatley Court, you would not go to Soward Way and you would not go to Gungahlin, where the services do not exist; you would go where people have provided services that meet your needs and meet the profile of your business.

What has happened is that the Brindabella Business Park has created a situation where people vote with their feet. It is not poaching. They have provided a service that other people do not provide. In my own electorate of Belconnen, there are scads of vacant offices in the light industrial area. Why are they vacant? It is because they do not meet the high quality demanded by people who want to run businesses in this town today. That means that for places like Belconnen and places like Tuggeranong, in particular, we need to see a revivification. We need to see the capacity to have mixed-use development and to do all sorts of things which are innovative. Innovation is what has caused people to go to the Brindabella Business Park. It is not poaching. It is the fact that someone is prepared to spend some money to build some A-plus class office accommodation. That is what it is all about.

Mr Speaker, this motion is innocuous in its intent, but its motivation is one entirely of malice. When Mr Hargreaves stands up here and says that he is not opposed to the airport, we need to take a reality check, we really do need to take a reality check, because every utterance that comes from him about the airport is laced with venom and is laced with envy. While it is laudable of him to be wanting to encourage development and job opportunities in his own electorate, and I applaud him for that, you do not do it by

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .