Page 4094 - Week 13 - Thursday, 6 December 2007
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Belconnen busways planned before we build Belconnen. Therefore, before we build Molonglo, we should have the Molonglo busway or light rail route planned. Schools, shops, block orientation and so on are all things that are planned in advance, but, unfortunately, sustainability has not been one of the things the planners have had in mind.
The north Weston development, and later Molonglo, are perfect opportunities for the ACT to create an area based on solar passive siting of blocks, based on 90 per cent of transport being sustainable, based on preservation of the river corridor and its flora and fauna and based on water and energy-efficient buildings. The ACT community will be disappointed if the development is anything else.
In 10 years time people will be only looking for houses like that. We would be letting our community, our country, and indeed the world, down if we insisted on less. Indeed, if it is not state of the art on the sustainability scale, questions should be asked about whether this development should go ahead at all.
Sustainability legislation needs to be prioritised. Considerations of energy and water efficiency and emissions minimisation need to pervade all aspects of government policy. The responsible policy response to the threat of climate change is for the government to impress upon all public servants the seriousness of the issue, or perhaps the public servants could impress that upon the government.
The government needs to prioritise the implementation of measures that contribute to minimising the ACT’s greenhouse gas emissions. Of course the public needs to be brought along on this issue. I would claim that the public is often further ahead than the government. Public and government education campaigns are an important feature of the government’s response.
Fortunately, the climate change denial party lost the federal election, and we can hope and expect to see the government-funded scientific community being less bullied and less punished for speaking the truth about climate change and its impact on Australia. I hope that the climate experts who were driven out of CSIRO by the Howard government’s policies are re-funded and reinstated.
I dwell on climate change in the context of a debate on land release because the lack of consideration that has been given to solar orientation in the past is nothing short of criminal. Future generations will be appalled at the levels of ignorance that shaped our suburbs. Given that the knowledge, the precedents and the unheeded advocates have existed for decades, they will wonder how it was that planning agencies in the early years of the 21st century seemed to have next to no regard for the orientation, solar access, wind direction, slope and drainage patterns of the land on which houses were situated when they drew up the block plans and built the infrastructure that projected their inefficiencies onto future generations.
Clearly this is a difficult issue. There is strong demand for land in the ACT, which is leading to an increase in both rental and sale prices across the board. The Chief Minister has issued clear directions that he is serious about addressing the issue of affordability, and this seems to have added extra impetus to the priority which the LDA and ACTPLA are giving to the problem.
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