Page 3482 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 2005
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I would like to go through the extent of some of that evaluation process. The objectives of the evaluation process include determining which provisions provide benefit to the community and those that have generated, or may generate, adverse development outcomes; testing the adverse provisions and working out solutions to them; developing a draft evaluation paper, which will be used for discussion with industry groups, community councils, the Planning and Land Council and the broader public; and a final evaluation report, which will be provided to the Assembly.
The scope of this process includes a review of comments raised by the public in regard to development applications and neighbourhood planning issues; summarising findings and advice given by the Planning and Land Council, the AAT, ACTPLA itself and the Supreme Court in relation to any matters that have been dealt with as they relate to the garden city provisions; a review of multiunit development applications before and after the application of variation 200, including numbers, locations, quality of applications, objection numbers, proportion of dual occupancies to other multiunit development and so on; the consideration of how development responds to narrow frontage blocks; termini of cul de sacs; relationships to main roads—all issues that have been raised by the Planning and Land Council; testing these garden city provisions to determine problems; and taking into account comments received during the public consultation process as part of the evaluation.
As you can see, Mr Speaker, there is already a very broad exercise that is going to be put into place and is being put into place right now. I have agreed to that scope and the terms of reference. And that process will do the work that we said would be done to evaluate the effectiveness of the garden city provisions. For that reason, the government does not believe that we need to take the approaches outlined by Dr Foskey in her motion. And it is for that reason that I am foreshadowing an amendment to the motion.
It is worth highlighting and dwelling a little on how local centres are performing now compared to some years ago. Over time, as Dr Foskey rightly acknowledges, there have been significant changes in consumer spending patterns, and these have particularly impacted on the local centre level of our retail hierarchy. The proportion of retail expenditure at local centres has fallen from around 20 per cent of all retail expenditure in the early 1970s to less than 10 per cent today. In effect, the total level of expenditure at local centres has been almost halved since most local centres were built. And that clearly has an impact on their viability and clearly has an impact on their role.
This is being driven by a range of social and economic changes, including an ageing population; a decrease in the average household size—fewer families with children, for example; an increase in female workforce participation, which is particularly marked here in the ACT. There are also longer trading hours for some of the larger supermarkets in our group centres, town centres and Civic. Also, there is an increasing consumer preference for variety and convenience of one-stop shopping at larger competing supermarkets.
There are changes in consumer preferences and retail patterns, including an increased dominance of fresh food retailing and pre-prepared foods, the incorporation of uses such as butchers and bakeries into larger supermarkets. There is also an ongoing rationalisation of smaller services such as banks and post offices that previously were
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