Page 923 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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MR STANHOPE: This question gives me an opportunity to clarify much of the misleading commentary that has been led by the Liberal Party in relation to issues around the busway. It needs to be understood that the work that the government has done—through ACTPLA and under the stewardship of the minister in relation to the Belconnen busway—was vital in the context of ensuring that we as a community, as a city committed to sustainability, have the capacity, at a time of the government’s choosing and budgetary convenience, to construct an efficient, effective and sustainable public transport network throughout the ACT.
This needs to be understood. An example that is relevant to any discussion about the Belconnen to city busway is the work done by the NCDC, as it then was, in the 1960s in relation to the Gungahlin Drive or, as it then was, the John Dedman Parkway. The land on which the Gungahlin Drive extension is currently being constructed was reserved as a road reserve by, I believe, the NCDC in around 1964 and 1965 for the purposes of ensuring that, at a convenient time in the future, land would be available without restriction, impediment or encumbrance to be utilised for the construction of such a road as is now being constructed on that reserve—the Gungahlin Drive extension.
The land was reserved 40 years ago because the planners of the day had the foresight, the energy and the determination to ensure that we planned this city, this pre-eminent planned city of the world. We need to plan. And to plan we need to continue to look to our future needs, and we need to plan and govern accordingly.
The Belconnen busway planning work undertaken by ACTPLA in recent years is vital to the future of this city; vital to the development of an effective and efficient public transport system; vital to the future of our capacity to deal with issues around greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; and vital to the capacity of this city to live within reasonable and sustainable constraints in terms of our future development.
We have not abandoned the Belconnen to Civic busway in any shape or form. The government at no stage has taken a decision to fund the construction of the Belconnen busway. We will not be funding it this year; we will not be funding it next year. But the Belconnen to Civic busway will one day be funded and will one day be built, just as those planners in the 1960s developed a transport corridor for a future road to be known, in their minds, as the John Dedman Parkway.
In other words, when the population to the north of the city, now Gungahlin, demanded or required it, land would be reserved, and a suburb such as Kaleen would not be built on top of it; so that institutions such as the institute of sport would not encroach on it; so that there was a capacity when the day came to build the Gungahlin Drive extension to meet the needs of this expanding city without having to build tunnels, overpasses and bypasses.
Similarly with the Belconnen to city busway, we are planning for the future expansion and growth of a sustainable city committed to showing leadership in relation to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas, and of a city around which we have genuine mobility.
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