Page 2841 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 September 2006
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MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (10.39): I would like to make a few comments on the report. Firstly, I think it is important that we are developing some of these newer suburbs in Gungahlin. There is significant demand in the ACT market at the moment for new residential space and I think it is important that we do bring these things on line. I want to raise a couple of the committee’s recommendations that I opposed and make brief comments in relation to some of those.
Recommendation 5 states:
The Committee recommends that the Minister for Planning reconsider the width of the buffer areas in the proposed suburb of Crace along Barton Highway and adjacent to Gungaderra Grassland Nature Reserve with a view to widening these and strengthening their native landscape character with plants of local provenance.
I think it is important to have sufficient buffer zones and I think that ACTPLA and the ACT government have taken account of that through a fairly detailed process. My concern, as I will outline with some of the other recommendations, is that we consistently tinker at the edges or make recommendations about tinkering at the edges and every time we do that, for all sorts of reasons, we just reduce the amount of available space in these new suburbs. It is important that we get the balance right, but I think that due consideration has been given to issues such as buffer zones and to other environmental considerations which I will get into in a moment.
I think that every time we limit the space we put further upward pressure on prices in the ACT market. The most recent survey result showed that the cost of housing in the ACT is the third highest in the country. The ACT has only just been overtaken by Western Australia simply because of the massive resources boom there and the absolutely unbelievable house prices in Western Australia at the moment. I think that is a genuine concern and that is one of my concerns with recommendations like this one.
Another recommendation which I had some concerns with is recommendation 11, which reads:
The Committee recommends that in the proposed suburb of Crace, the bushfire protection zone should be established outside nature reserves with adjacent edge roads, where possible, so as not to erode the reserves’ biodiversity values.
My concern there is that in terms of bushfire protection, bushfire abatement zones, our primary focus should be on protecting the community. I think that needs to be paramount and I do not think that we should be dictating to government that they should have all sorts of other considerations in terms of bushfire protection zones. The absolute primary focus of these should be to avoid the kind of calamity we had in January 2003 with the massive loss of property and life. So I think it is important that we do not have arbitrary limits on where those bushfire protection zones are put. I think they should be put in a place which gives maximum protection to the community. Recommendation 12 states:
The Committee recommends that the Planning and Land Authority attach conditions to each approved development application that will result in the loss of a significant tree or trees, requiring the developer to contribute to a biodiversity restoration initiative that will deliver equivalent biodiversity value.
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