Page 722 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 2010
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encouraging active transport and having a bit of activity integral in our lives instead of being something that we have to drive our car and go to the gym for. In the long run, it will save people money and it will save the territory money. Instead of providing a lot more roads, we can provide cycle highways and footpaths for people to walk on. The city will be healthier and the people in the city will be healthier. We will create a more sustainable city which will have fewer negative impacts on the world.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition), by leave: I was not here while the minister was delivering his speech—and I am not sure if it was delivered to my office—because I was at the organ donor awareness function, so I will just pick up on a couple of the points in the plan.
It is worth noting that all of Mr Barr’s good ideas in planning seem to draw their inspiration from our policies. We compliment him on finally, and hopefully, signalling that the government has learnt its lesson from some of its planning policies about focusing in and around core areas for its residential infill. What we said in our 2004 policy was:
… concentrating high density residential development along major transport corridors and around town and group centres.
I read from the statement of planning intent:
… implement more comprehensive measures to increase residential density in and around town and group centres, and along transport corridors …
It does sound extraordinarily familiar to me, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Mr Barr: There has not been disagreement about that.
MR SESELJA: Well, there is disagreement, because the focus of ACT Labor has been to dump it in the core areas; their way of delivering infill has been the core areas. What have they done in the spatial plan to deliver that? What have they done, say, in relation to Northbourne Avenue? What have they done in relation to Civic and having more people live in Civic?
We saw a belated announcement of a plan from the Chief Minister, which was universally panned because it had no detail; it had no demonstration of how they were going to get there. It was merely a case of the Chief Minister being at the end of his time and putting out policies to say, “I’d like to see double the number of people living in Civic.” Well, that is good, but what are you going to do to actually achieve that? We have seen redevelopments in recent years where there could have been mixed use, where we could have seen residential, and we did not. We have seen no movement in areas such as Northbourne Avenue.
This government have been obsessed with what has been proven to be a very flawed core-area policy, which they gradually had to wind back because of the inevitable problems that go with it. That has become even less effective than it was in terms of delivering infill, because it was such a flawed policy and they had to change some of
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