Page 1206 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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realm, need to have a high-quality public realm to make it work. So I would ask the government to look beyond Green Square, to look at this for all of the areas of the ACT where our urban intensity is increasing.
Recommendation 13 about enhanced solar orientation and solar access rights is, as I guess members will appreciate, an issue very dear to my heart, very dear to the Greens. I hope we get these territory plan amendments coming up as soon as possible and I hope they are really good amendments.
The last one, about high-speed broadband connections, is also important as we are becoming more and more a wired virtual community. It seems crazy that we still seem to be building developments which do not have high-speed broadband connection. I understand that quite a lot of this is under the responsibility of the federal government but, to the extent that the ACT government can influence it, I believe it should.
That is really all I have got to say, except to reiterate what I said at the beginning. I really hope that next year this is going to be a much more forward-looking report because the government will have done a lot more forward-looking work on what is the ACT’s long-term infrastructure.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (10.30): I stand as the final member to speak on the Standing Committee on Planning, Public Works and Territory and Municipal Services report. I, too, share my committee’s praise of the committee secretariat, in particular Nicola and Sandra. They do a great job. They are very thorough, very diligent and very easy to communicate with. So I thank them for their continued great service.
Firstly, I would like to support what Ms Le Couteur said about the TAMS part of the report and the TAMS process being much more forward looking and much more geared towards the future. I think what we do tend to see with some of these annual reports is simply them trying to get the bare minimum of reporting requirements as opposed to actually giving a fair indication of where the department is at and what their plans are for the future. I certainly do share Ms Le Couteur’s thoughts when it comes to that issue.
I would also like to express my disappointment at the fact that we could not get the Chief Minister until February for the annual reports hearing. After February, we are already seven or eight months into the next annual report period; so it really does seem to be not the best process and not the best way forward if we do have to wait as long as eight months to actually hear about what happened in June. I hope that this year we might be able to get the Chief Minister for a few more hours and at a much earlier time in the cycle.
Going to a few of the specifics in the report—I will not go through all the recommendations—there are a couple that I do want to highlight. The first is recommendation 2:
The Committee recommends that the Annual Report for the Land Development Agency includes the procurement type for each contract listed.
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