Page 1734 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 5 May 2010
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In the Ginninderra electorate there is the matter of the Giralang shops. They have been vacant for—one of the Ginninderra members could tell me the number of years but as far as I know—five or six years already. I think we are up to our third development application on this. Clearly, we do have a real problem with development controls once land has been sold, because there are only a very limited number of things that the ACT government can do to ensure that development actually happens the way it would like it to happen. As I said, I would very much welcome a debate about how the government can do these things better.
Moving past there, because that is not really the focus of this motion, although it is a problem this motion talks about, subparagraph (d) states:
(d) communities need to have a place in their neighbourhood to congregate;
Again, the Greens are in furious agreement with this. As we said earlier, as we all agree, there are no local shops there. It would be great if there was more of a community hub in Dunlop. There are the nature parks and there are some wonderful parts of nature in Dunlop but no community facilities.
The next one is:
(e) as of 10 July 2009, the Chief Minister did not know that shops were planned for Dunlop;
I do actually have quite a degree of sympathy for Mr Stanhope for not knowing every item of development in the ACT. I am prepared to admit that I do not know every item of development in the ACT. I think that there are more important matters. It is quite forgivable that the Chief Minister is not fully aware of the state of all development applications in the ACT.
In paragraph (2), Mr Coe called on the government to do a number of things and, to quite an extent, Mr Barr went through that in his answer. But I guess, more broadly, I touch on one of the really frustrating things with the current system with ACTPLA and its website, which is that once a development application has had its two weeks notification period it then disappears off the website. So if you think, “Yes, there might have been a DA and it might have happened a few months ago,” you have got no way of finding out.
I can understand that for the residents of Dunlop this is a frustrating thing. If they happen to miss the DA, which would be quite easy to do, they do not know that it even occurred. And, once it has occurred, they have got no way of finding out the progress on it. So I agree possibly with the intent behind Mr Coe’s comments here. And this is something I have been bringing up for some time, that ACTPLA clearly keeps development applications on disk somewhere. They should also be accessible through ACTPLA’s website so that members of the community can find out what is happening in their suburbs.
The next item is that land be allocated for the construction of a childcare facility in Dunlop. My colleague Ms Hunter will address this as she is more familiar with the
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