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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2576 ..

argued that they did not want their suburb changed. Public housing tenants, on the other hand, were most keen to see ACT Housing keep properties in Ainslie, new or old.

As it happens, the homeowners more or less won that battle and the next five years saw a number of houses, public and private, replaced by upmarket homes and dual occupancies. The suburb has changed irrevocably, both in terms of the streetscape and in terms of the social mix. That is more of the pressure-group approach to neighbourhood planning.

Hackett, Watson and Downer recently experienced a more engaged neighbourhood planning process run by PALM and ACTPLA. It was run by PALM and then they changed their name to ACTPLA. It had a strategic dimension, coming as it did after the garden city variation to the territory plan which consolidated more intense development close to shops and cut back on dual occupancies across the rest of the suburb.

This was a fairly complex process involving, firstly, an exploration of community values for the suburbs; then a creative interpretation of those ideas that earned a fairly volatile response; and then a more detailed, fine-grained negotiation to come out with something fairly acceptable to the most interested parties. At different times interested parties clearly did not understand the process. At other times participants clearly were not prepared to accept some of the broader changes in terms of demography, the property market, the growing commitment to sustainability and what is necessary for viable local shops and facilities. Also, I am not sure how a process like this builds in the interests of older and younger people and more socially excluded people.

While we remain committed, then, to neighbourhood planning, more work needs to happen to establish the trust that clearly needs to underpin such a process. I have to say that just last week I was at a neighbourhood planning meeting in Hackett and I was also at a meeting of residents in Phillip recently. It really is clear that there are three key points that come up from these meetings every time: one, the developers are going to ram as much as they can on a block to maximise profit at our expense; secondly, it does not matter what is promised by the government in terms of quality or what will really happen in terms of the consultation and the feedback that is received, they do not believe it, they do not think it is going to go anywhere; and thirdly, interestingly, there is usually at least one if not more people who say, “If we weren’t so afraid that the development would be shocking, we wouldn’t be so against it.” In other words, there is a really strong understanding in the community about the quality of development and the desire to see high quality, beautiful development. The word “beautiful” came up in Hackett last week. It was very interesting to me to notice how the different suggestions were picked up.

The issue, of course, was sustainability. There is a genuine interest but, once again, there is a lack of real understanding about what that means. An ecological best practice or environmental best practice in building design is something that we really need to be talking about and communicating about a lot more and also linking it with the aesthetic of beauty, because the two are quite compatible. There are synergies between these two traits or characteristics of good developments. It really is quite obvious; these things keep coming up.

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