Page 1747 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 May 2005
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university or at least watched the DVD—is that it is possible to conceive of Canberra city without Vernon Circle; and if you can conceive of Canberra city without Vernon Circle you have a better city. And that is the difference. It is an idea that no-one else has been prepared to have the courage to have. We have all wrung our hands—I count myself amongst those people who have wrung our hands, collectively—and said, “Gee, we can’t do anything about Vernon Circle.” Somebody had the courage, the audacity, to think outside the circle, to imagine Canberra, imagine Civic, without it and come up with a proposal.
While Mr Corbell has said that all ideas are on the table, there should be consultation and it should be open and public—and I hope that he stops spitting out words like “private sector proposal” because some private citizen rather than the planning commissar has had this idea and it is inherently wrong. While he is having all those ideas and is swanning around the world looking at garden cities, he might look at the ways that they found in Portland, Oregon, or in Florida, when we go to Disney World or whatever we are doing in Florida. We are going to visit the garden towns of the UK. I hope that we would actually look at what steps they have taken to ensure that the public parklands—the pinnacle of our city, the symbolic heart of our city—of Portland, Oregon, of Florida and of Disney World, those public hearts, are not alienated by expressways and roundabouts.
I hope that the minister can come back from his jaunt around the world with some ideas about how not to alienate important public spaces. And instead of, using Mr Seselja’s words, “having entrenched an obstinate opposition to any idea which is not his own” we shall have a real, open discussion.
What Mr Seselja’s motion, a very welcome motion, does today is recognise the history of the work that has been done in the Canberra city. It goes back to the Griffin legacy. As we have said, Griffin designed the city at the turn of the last century. Much of what he designed in many ways will need to change, but the essential elements are there. What the living city program proposal does is to go back to those essential elements and say, “How can we make this happen?” It is daring and it is more daring that any of us dared to be.
When the National Capital Authority and the Australian government put out its Griffin legacy it actually could not look beyond the fact that Vernon Circle existed. The Griffin legacy documentation says that we are stuck with Vernon Circle. The previous Liberal government, when it looked at its city heart plans, basically said that we were stuck with Vernon Circle. This minister says that we are stuck with Vernon Circle. What this is about is someone daring to have an idea that thinks outside the circle, and this minister does not like it.
What we have in answer to that is a range of strategies. We have got a parking strategy. That means we are going to remove all parking and take repressive steps against all drivers of cars. We have got a tax system. Of course, we have now got an extra levy to tart up the city because it is so run down that suddenly we are making people in the private domain pay for things that are normally paid for by the public domain.
We talked about Mr Hargreaves’s dedicated maintenance programs. I am not quite sure how much blue paint will be involved in that dedicated maintenance program. I love it.
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