Page 3907 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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you would notice, Mr Assistant Speaker, are in Brindabella. Certainly none of them are in the Tuggeranong Valley. One of my jobs here is to represent Brindabella and the Tuggeranong Valley, and I will do that to the best of my ability.
It may well have been useful to have the list. Perhaps we could have had a further debate. It might actually be a debate for another day about this whole process. I am not pre-empting what is in Ms Le Couteur’s amendment, but the processes of this government concern me. For those that do not recall, the previous Liberal government had a strong campaign to upgrade shopping centres. We did fabulous work at Narrabundah, we did work at Manuka, as you would remember, Mr Hargreaves, and Curtin. They are some of the outstanding successes of that period, and the upgrades of the current government have been successful, too. But there are a number of shopping centres that need action now. It is one of the vagaries of the way that Canberra came about that so many suburbs were built in such a short period of time that the infrastructure is ageing in big lumps.
If you live in Woden or Tuggeranong or Belconnen, you are in that time frame where it is now 20 and 30 years out from their original construction—in some cases 40 years—and they are worthy of attention. The Chief Minister has adopted the approach of saying, “Tell me how you’d do it.” Well, we are telling you how we are doing it. We have got an infrastructure bill on the table—it is to establish the infrastructure commissioner—so that we do get detailed infrastructure plans, so that we do have a forward plan, so that we have long-term planning, one, for the maintenance, two, for the reconstruction and, three, for the acquisition of new pieces of infrastructure, and so that this stops.
Coming down and berating people is not the way to do it. Mr Barr, I congratulate you on your approach. Thank you very much for your contribution to the debate. I accept what you say about adaptable cities, and that will become more and more an important part of this discussion. I think the adaptable cities conference starts next week at federal parliament. It will be a very important part of the way we look at Australia into the future.
But my concern is for the people of Kambah today. It is where they live, and they want decent facilities. When you talk to people, when you talk to the retailers at Kambah, they say, “The elderly citizens who live across on the other side in the aged persons units”—which I believe started under my term as the housing minister—“around the Anglican church and some of the new constructions are afraid to come across here because they trip, or they can’t cross roads, or they’re worried about the lighting or the security,” and that means we have got to do something today. It is well and good to say, three, five, 10 or however many years you want to put it out, but that is unacceptable.
It strikes me from what the Chief Minister has said, and what Mr Barr added, that a fair percentage of the work on a comprehensive master plan has been done. To my mind, a master plan would incorporate the Kambah Village shopping centre, the developments along Kett Street and across the road into the service station complex with those few retail outlets that they have there. If that whole area were encompassed into a master plan—taking into account the outlying retail outlets or locations that are
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