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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2367 ..
MR STEFANIAK
(continuing):Mr Stanhope, we might have introduced some parking zones, but we did not go down the path of introducing paid-parking in Belconnen, your electorate, or Tuggeranong. The bureaucrats were always wanting to do that. I can recall our first budget cabinet in 1995 when that came up on the agenda. It was knocked off by Mr De Domenico and me and by our other two colleagues, the then Chief Minister, Mrs Carnell, and Mr Humphries. That was something we resisted. You have now done that as a quick money grab.
We have seen some attendant problems with that. I have already had some complaints from people in my own electorate about that. Without going over the discussion that has been had here today, other members have spoken about the problems in relation to Lake Tuggeranong College and the problems that are occurring at Tuggeranong as a result of that. Yes, there has been a quick grab for a bit of cash there, not a huge amount, but there will be a lot of dislocation and it may not be the smartest thing to do.
Mr Speaker, there are a number of problems with this Urban Services budget. There are some things that, quite clearly, are unsustainable. There are some projects in the capital works area which are good to see. They have taken a long time, far too long. This government is amazingly slow in doing anything, it moves at a glacial pace, but there are at least a couple of items there which are good to see and I certainly hope that we will see them come to fruition this time.
MS TUCKER
(9.39): The Urban Services part of the budget contains several aspects of concern to the Greens. In particular, there is the further work on establishing the government's new land planning and development system, there is the land release program and there is the Labor government's continuation of the Liberals' 1960s-thinking road-building program in the construction of the Gungahlin Drive extension.I have already said that we support the move to a new planning system and to public land development, and commend the government for that, but I am concerned to see that the agency and the government do not get too carried away with the commercial focus of maximising returns at the expense of other important policy objectives, such as making housing more affordable and protecting the environment.
On the Gungahlin Drive extension: we said in last year's budget debate that the government should be rethinking the whole rationale for this road, rather than spending its energy on defending its ill-considered election promise to build it on the western route. We still say that. Now that the government has caved in to the NCA's ruling on the route that the government will be allowed to choose, it has decided not to take this setback as an opportunity to review the original thinking behind the road and apply the principles contained in its issues paper Sustainable Transport for the ACT.
As this paper acknowledges, building more roads is one answer, but not a very strategic one. Experience tells us that over time more and wider roads lead eventually to more cars and a return to congestion, oft times worse than before. That is what we can expect to achieve from the expenditure of the many millions of dollars being committed to these environmentally destructive roadworks.
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