Page 1203 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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We all know that there are those who, after the event, believe that their particular point of view did not carry enough weight and therefore they are unhappy with the outcome. Invariably, these people blame the process and say they were not consulted. That is not to say that we should not at all times try our utmost to ensure that proper processes are in place, well advertised and, as I said, accessible.
I would like to conclude by thanking my fellow members of the standing committee, Ms Le Couteur and Mr Coe, and the secretary, formerly Nicola Derigo but now Nicola Kossek. Congratulations, Nicola, on your recent marriage. I would also like to thank Dr Sandra Lilburn for her assistance while our committee secretary was away and, of course, the Committee Office staff.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (10.18): First off, I would like to second the chair’s thanks to the committee secretariat and my fellow committee members. Secondly, I guess I come upon this report with a great feeling that nothing has happened in the last year, because we did this a year ago. We were reporting on our work in planning and our work in territory and municipal services and I had really hoped that in the last year there would have been changes in both of those areas.
I had hoped that in the last year the government would have looked at, for instance, our transport system. Our transport system is influenced by planning and by territory and municipal services. Our transport system could change so that it is more sustainable. It could change so that it involved a bit more activity from the people who were involved with it—walkers, pedestrians, cyclists. And if we did that, that would lead to healthier Canberrans. It would also lead to less energy being used in transport systems.
Our transport system could change so that our bus system was actually meeting the needs of Canberra and that the people were able to walk on safe footpaths to conveniently available buses. We have not been talking about that stuff as part of the annual reports very much—a little, I admit, but not to the extent that it should be.
Also, with building and planning, this report is not full of how we are going to be meeting the challenges of climate change. And I think this is a real pity because the planning system and the territory and municipal services which we deal with here are the parts of the government that are building the infrastructure which hopefully will be around for the next 50, 100, whatever years in Canberra.
Those are the things that we absolutely have got to get right. If we are going to have a city that is going to be a great city to live in in the future, not just a city that has been good to live in, we have got to do our planning for the future and not for the past. Reading through this report, reading through all the annual reports and talking to the officials, we are not doing enough of that. We are doing very little of that, unfortunately.
I will now move on to some more specific points. The first one I will make is a somewhat depressing point. There are two places in which the committee points out to relevant officials that there is information that they could have and that they do not seem to have. On page 16, recommendation 6 is:
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