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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2762 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

operating in a building market that is quite rampant, so they cannot meet the costs of what is being asked. They cannot afford to rebuild what they would like to build. They are not a couple of people who are going out of their way to build something extravagant and huge. They simply want to replace what they used to have. They cannot; they cannot afford it.

They wanted to look at the option of having a dual occupancy. One of the sons or grandsons was interested in moving onto the block, which is quite a large block, and wished to build a dual occupancy. The older couple saw that as a quite acceptable thing, because they would have younger members of the family close by to look after them in their final years, may those final years be a long, long time, but they cannot do so because they cannot get financing. Why can't they get financing? It is because they cannot unit title.

We have just excluded the vast majority, I suspect, of Canberrans of the opportunity to have dual occupancy where appropriate. We should make it appropriate. Perhaps it should be provided in this variation that dual occupancies can occur only where appropriate, not that dual occupancies will occur only where the minister has determined. Circumstances across all of the suburbs will vary, so you are going to get different proportions of dual occupancies in different suburbs. Is that equitable? No, it is not. It is not sustainable and it is not equitable.

I have to take Mr Hargreaves and Mr Corbell to task on the notion that the community was silent. Mr Hargreaves stood and made the grand statement that, apart from a few little groups, the community was silent. I just wonder whether Mr Hargreaves actually read the message written on the chest of the protester, which went something like "DV 200: a death to community consultation."We do not have too many community protests that actually work their way into the chamber, and we are certainly not encouraging that, but there is a measure, a very large measure, of angst out in the community.

MR SPEAKER: A very disorderly one, too.

MR SMYTH: It was very disorderly, Mr Speaker. We certainly would not be encouraging it. That people who, I am quite sure, are aware of the ways of the Assembly and your presence, Mr Speaker, were willing to do that just shows the strength of the passion and commitment out there to stop draft variation 200.

The Manuka LAPAC was very much against it. The Manuka LAPAC, if I remember correctly some of the reports and things I have read, said that the government should go back to the drawing board. The Manuka LAPAC normally have strong opinions and have a lot of communication and consultation on these issues. They certainly were not part of Mr Hargreaves' silent majority.

Mr Speaker, we have here a recipe that will have to be revisited very soon, because it is a recipe that simply cannot work. One, it is not sustainable. This is the draft variation of urban sprawl. This is the draft variation that says go further and further when we all know that a limiting sum on the ACT is its borders and we all know that the greenfields sites that are available to any government that comes to place in this Assembly are quite clearly defined and land does not exist for continued urban

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