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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4168 ..

Everyone else wants to do something about plastic bags. The federal opposition’s environment spokesman wants to have a plastic bag ban, but Jon Stanhope is tied to the national convention because he really does not want to have an individual thought of his own.

Yesterday, I touched at length on planning, but I will lightly move over it today. I think that it is important to draw out and make the point that everything that is being done in relation to planning in the ACT is premised on a faulty assumption. We had, as was said yesterday, the spatial plan, which was a foray into six or seven volumes of things whereby people were consulted to death. You have to ask yourself what has happened to the spatial plan because at the same time, as I said yesterday, we have Griffith and Narrabundah residents up in arms over their neighbourhood planning consultation.

When you look at what the government has done, you will find that it has actually created a whole new genetically engineered concept. Core areas have been taken out of the middle of places and are now being carefully wrapped around the edges instead. It is very interesting to see all the time, effort and money that have gone into reshaping core areas in Griffith and Narrabundah without any reference to what might happen in west Fyshwick.

One of the principal initiatives of this government as a result of its spatial plan is to develop west Fyshwick, an area which will have, by anyone’s estimation, 2,000 to 3,000 medium-density residences, along with commercial and industrial development and keeping the Fyshwick markets there—all of those things—but the government wants basically to cause an embuggerance for every person who lives in Narrabundah and Griffith by messing up an already messed up system and creating medium-density housing in places where it would be totally and utterly inappropriate and without reference to what is happening on the other side of Canberra Avenue because the government cannot get its act together.

The government has a planning minister who keeps talking about transport reform and putting planning and transport together. A consultant came here from Brisbane to do work for the ACT and went back to Brisbane because nothing happened. We have had studies. We have had the demand elasticity study, the transport feasibility study and the draft and final of the transport strategic plan and we have the most pathetic set of targets you have ever seen in your life that will never achieve anything. Even when the KBR transport feasibility study pointed towards making a decision about light rail, this government could not do it. I do not know why. Perhaps it was because it is in the pay of the TWU and does not want to have trams when you can have good old reliable buses instead.

I come to the most important policy issue in the ACT on which this government has shown absolute and complete failure. Not content with allowing the catchment of the ACT to be burnt out in 2003, we now have a government that is completely and utterly paralysed when it comes to dealing with issues of water security. The issues have been documented at length. By the government’s own admission, we need to build a dam by 2017. The opposition disagrees. We think that we have to do it sooner. But, as things stand, to plan, build and fill a dam will take 10 years and this government will do nothing about it. It will make no commitments because it is too afraid to make a commitment. It is a big issue.

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