Page 3279 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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Greens are calling for the same protective measures that apply on the other side of Kingston Group Centre where businesses are restricted to normal business hours of operation. It is about equity.
Noise will be an issue here, and that is acknowledged in the variation that specifies noise abatement plans for all future business and activities. However, I do not believe the approach that the government has taken makes sense. For instance, noise is to be handled through the residents making complaints and then the appropriate authority coming out and acting on these complaints. This is hardly a preventative measure. It puts residents in the position of being complainers, which is not something that people generally choose.
The whole thing about planning is that it is a tool to prevent that sort of thing. It is a tool to manage public and private areas. It is a tool that should be used to make sure there is an appropriate buffer between those things. If we are committed to making our neighbourhood centres—and Kingston was once just a neighbourhood centre—more lively, then we really have to bite the bullet on this and not close our eyes to pre-existing arrangements where residents bought houses believing that they were in one situation and then, due to a change in planning laws, find they are in another and then find that they are blamed for complaining about it.
Of course, it has been suggested by government, by the few businesses who are pushing for more opportunities in this place and by a few media commentators—and an interview I did on the ABC really pushed this—that this is all about vitality, that Canberra is growing up and we all want to have more fun in the streets, eating and drinking and so on, and that people who do not like these changes in Kingston ought to get over it or get out because, after all, there are lots of quiet suburbs elsewhere in Canberra.
This is a facile and unreasonable attack on Kingston residents who have been there for up to 30 years. It presumes that vibrant shopping life cannot be sustained in Kingston unless it reaches across the other side of Jardine Street, that the 30 restaurants and bars that are already there and the numerous ones about to go into the Kingston Foreshore development are not enough and that being the centre of an intense residential zone does not qualify local residents for the kind of shopping centre that actually provides the kind of services that people who choose to live within walking distance of a neighbourhood centre—something that I believe underpins the Canberra plan—want.
I have on other occasions argued in favour of supporting and encouraging a vibrant cultural environment. These include promotion of schemes to support live music and comments on business and resident attitudes in the context of pressure to shut down Toast, which is a very popular venue among young people quite close to the Waldorf Hotel and discussion of the demise of the Gypsy Bar. In these cases, it was the entertainment businesses that went because the residents complained, so there are other inequities involved here.
But the question of balance really needs to consider the existing environment and the amenities that exist in the suburbs that people have moved to. Gypsy Bar and Toast are in the city. People moving into the city should know what they are in for. Should they be able to move into a pre-existing environment and then have the nerve to complain about things that are already there? I think it is a great pity that the Gypsy Bar went. It was an important venue for young people. Young people complain, I think rightly, that they are
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