Page 25 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
many areas of the ACT is above the Australian standard. This is something we need to spend money on.
There are many things that we need to spend money on. I am not going to spend an hour talking about this; I will just get back to more road-related expenditure. An extra $5 million will not reduce road transport in the ACT or in Harrison. I would have to say that I would be vastly more positive if I thought that the road realignment would lead to a situation where we did not need to have as much road traffic. If we were not going to be as car dependent, I would be much more positive. I would also say that it is my hope, my very strong hope, that, to quite an extent as a result of the work all four Greens are doing here on trying to reduce Canberra’s car dependence, there will never be a four-lane highway in front of Carpentaria Street and that, after the two-lane road—one lane in each direction—is built, the ACT’s love affair with cars will cool and the road will never, ever need to be duplicated.
If we are talking about roads, of course there are many other road areas where residents are living next to very large, busy roads. The residents of north Canberra next to Northbourne Avenue, which is a six-lane highway, come to mind, as well as many residents in the inner north who moved into houses 20, 30 or 50 years ago in areas with what were very low volume roads and now are very high volume roads.
I was very surprised that in his statement Mr Barr left out his signature line about politics in planning. In the interests of continuity—
Mr Barr: Why don’t you say it for me now?
MS LE COUTEUR: I will put that in.
Mr Barr interjecting—
MS LE COUTEUR: If you have a new line, I will have politics in planning. The Greens’ view has always been clear: there is a role for politics in planning, but that role is in setting the strategic direction and the consultation frameworks, getting the territory plan right and all of those things. It is not desirable to have the Assembly trying to be traffic engineers and do the alignments of roads on the floor of the Assembly. I do not believe that there is anyone in the Assembly who actually thinks that is the best way of doing road alignments.
Clearly this is an example of community consultation which has not worked well. I do not think anybody could say that it is community consultation that has worked well. I quite understand why the residents are concerned. Clearly there will be a loss of open space and clearly there will be noise. As far as we are concerned, it has not been good consultation. In the future when roads are planned like this, one thing that would probably be very useful would be to put a sign up a lot earlier. I know that the government did that a number of years ago to mark future urban areas. You go past these signs and you think, “Mmm.” It would be very useful if the signs also said “future major road” so that people would appreciate that the road actually is there. Some people buying houses do not actually read the territory plan first. I do appreciate Mr Barr’s point that if they had read it they would have appreciated it, but not everybody does that.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video