Page 4973 - Week 13 - Thursday, 12 November 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
are a lot of things that happen in the parliamentary triangle which do impact upon the ACT and so I have made the subject broader so that other contributions can be about things other than the ASIO building.
It is easy for us who are residents of Canberra who are not federal public servants to forget that what we live in is actually the national capital. We think we live in our home town, our city that we love and we are trying to improve it and to live our lives quite separately from what goes on at the big house on the hill. We tend to forget that Canberra would not exist as the city it is, or in fact possibly exist at all, if it was not the capital of Australia. Our planned city is due to the fact it was created to house the parliament of Australia and the public service.
The rest of Australia thinks of Canberra not as a city which has living, breathing human beings in it but as a place with the big house on the hill and that is its only function in life. This view of life is relevant to how Canberra works in almost every regard. Because of this, we are a planned city and it has well been argued that we are the most planned city in the world. It is certainly well argued that we are a well-planned city.
We have a national capital plan which dictates many of the design elements of the city, and this plan is in fact largely designed around the aesthetics of Canberra as seen from Parliament House. This means that all the hills and buffers and ridges which are visible from parliament are actually protected by the federal government, by the NCA, and that is a major thing which gives us the bush capital feel. It also dictates the size of the height of the buildings in those areas, and the interesting thing, also, is that it is the national capital plan which in fact controls not only all the development in the parliamentary triangle but all the development in the ACT, because the territory plan has to be consistent with the national capital plan.
The territory plan is in fact subservient to the national capital plan. All of this goes to the heart of the issues that we are talking about here—the role of the ACT versus the role of the commonwealth in what is very arguably the heart of the city that we all live in. It is probably a source of much frustration to all of the people, and to all of us MLAs and our staff here, when Canberra residents complain to us about things which they are unhappy about which are clearly not part of our jurisdiction. The new ASIO building is one of the obvious points but it is far from the only one.
On that note I will quote from what the Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories said back in 2004 in their report on A National Capital, A Place to Live: An inquiry into the role of the National Capital Authority. At paragraph 8.14, the committee said:
The issue of the consultation process employed by the NCA has been of concern to the Committee for some time. Despite the Committee relaying its concerns to the Authority, on the basis of complaints the Committee has received, the situation does not appear to have been rectified. The Committee examines proposed works on behalf of the Parliament on the understanding that the Authority has sought advice from all interested stakeholders. The Committee finds that it now has to be more sceptical when examining proposals from the NCA. The Committee is particularly concerned that the Authority appears to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video