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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4055 ..

a variety of cities at various stages of their development, and how they might find their way through into a sustainable future. Some very important things are said about Canberra in this report, one of which is as follows:

Richly endowed with visionary planning and design, Canberra is a brave and bold urban experiment that befits its role as the national capital of a young, ambitious, and successful nation.

That is how the OECD assessed Canberra, basically on the cusp of a new government. It goes on to say:

The economic growth and prosperity of cities are crucial factors to their well being, frequently determining social and environmental outcomes. In the case of Canberra, a pro-active effort to build the city’s economy as a mix of public and private sectors…will affect the current spatial pattern.

It looks at various things that Canberra needs to do. It refers to the shift to “new economy” jobs, and adaptive reuse and modernisation of the city centre—the area known as Civic. It talks about enhancing coordination with the Commonwealth; consideration of sub-themes with an economic development focus; how a strategic planning process might make Canberra a better place; how it would relate to sustainability, land use and measures to realise the city’s potential so that it can be improved and the outcomes implemented. At the change of government, we had this assessment of the OECD—that there were a whole lot of things going for Canberra but we needed some strategic reassessment. Since then, we have had an awful lot of reassessment and an awful lot of documentation but, for the most part, I do not think it has been as strategic as some people would have us believe.

If you talk about a strategic plan for Canberra and you talk about it often enough and you say strategic this, strategic that and strategic the other thing, you might give people the impression, if they were not anything more than casual observers, that you were actually doing something that was really useful for Canberra. From the outset, in this job as shadow minister for planning, I have always been supportive of the development of a strategic planning initiative for Canberra. What this means, of course, is that you need to have a strategic plan. This is what the government talked about in terms of a spatial plan. But, instead of coming up with a spatial plan, we had two interminable years of publications and consultations. I will go through them.

There was the launch of the beautiful maroon report entitled The Canberra spatial plan—Canberra’s planning future in May 2002. Then there was the blue Your Canberra your future—changes and challenges in July 2002. There was then Your Canberra your say, which was a report on the community consultation of December 2002. As if you did not know what we were doing, there was then the lovely lilac Towards the Canberra spatial plan of August 2003. Then we got a draft spatial plan. It was December 2003 and we were getting pretty close. Then eventually we got it—The draft Canberra spatial plan.

You might notice that we had also changed format from the cute little curvy lines to something that became symbolic of the government—the blurred picture suddenly came into fine focus. The subliminal message is that, before Corbell and before Labor, everything was blurred; and now, during Corbell, we come into sharp focus. So we had

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