Page 1733 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 May 2010

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The second one is:

(b) the residents of Dunlop have been waiting too long for shops to be constructed …

Mr Barr gave us a much better summary of the situation than I could give on that. Yes, there still are not shops in Dunlop. However, the land was sold to a private owner and it is still within the time scales for development.

In (c) Mr Coe says:

I will have to talk about this a bit more here. I am not quite sure what Mr Coe thinks the government should have done differently, given the situation that the land is privately owned and a development application has been lodged and notified. The owner has taken all the legal steps that the owner is required to go through, and no-one has suggested, to my knowledge, that the government has done anything to make the construction of the shops difficult.

As Mr Barr alluded to, and I will talk a little more about, the government has very limited control of what happens to land once it is sold. This is, I think, a very significant issue for planning systems in capitalist economies such as ours. Mr Barr talked about it. There is a very limited amount of things the government can do. The government could resume the land, which would be interesting, and I believe the government might also be in a position, once the developer has exceeded the time the development application is valid for, to sue them for not actually completing the development application. But this is a really significant issue in Canberra and all capitalist economies.

This is not a new example. Other examples are the disused service station, petrol station, sites such as Page and Campbell and many others throughout the suburbs of Canberra. These are sites where everybody agrees that something should happen to them but we have had a briefing from the government and there appears to be very limited scope for the government to actually achieve change on those sites, to have the site in Page, which is also part of Ginninderra, turned into something that the people of Page would like to see.

We note that in the last budget the government extended the concession on development application fees for this. We think this is a very good move. And I would welcome debate about better ways, more effective ways, of getting these petrol station eyesores changed in our suburbs.

Last year and earlier this year, we had a debate about Deakin pool. Deakin pool is somewhere where the pool size has halved, despite the fact the government said a number of years ago it would not do so.

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