Page 3922 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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first development started in Weston Creek—we were its newsagent—in 1969 and we moved to our new shop in Fisher in, I think it was, 1971 or 1972. As their paper boy, I was riding my bike furiously around Kambah in 1974.
You have got this lump of infrastructure in the ACT—Belconnen, Woden and Tuggeranong—that was all built in the mid 1960 s to the mid 1980s. There is a 20-year building program that is all now coming of age. The assets that were handed over and surrendered to the people of the ACT by the commonwealth government in 1989 had, in most cases, much longer life expectancies on them than we have actually received.
If you look at the road network, it was severely impacted upon by the construction of the new Parliament House. Nobody took into account in the life of those major roads that so many trucks rumbled up and down as they built the new Parliament House.
That is our problem. That is why we are saying the answer is an infrastructure commissioner to look at these things long term, to plan long term, so that treasurers and planning ministers do not sit here and we hear the speeches about the perils of being a planning minister. It is important to get it right long term and to give people certainty so that businesses, communities and residents can make their decisions against what they know is coming. It is also important that the government keeps its word.
I know, for instance, families that moved into Macarthur, to swing back to that block of land in Macarthur, who rang the government and said, “What is happening on these sites? We want to move into Macarthur. We want some certainty. We want horse paddocks and we want the local surrounds to be bush.” They were told the government had no plans. And they bought on that proviso that nothing was going to happen on these blocks. As the minister points out, things change but there has got to be a process and there has got to be a better way of doing it than is currently being done.
I thank Ms Le Couteur for rewriting most of my motion into her amendment. It is a neat way of doing amendments. You delete the original motion and just rewrite it all, which is kind of novel, but she has picked up the major points.
I agree with this discussion, particularly in paragraph (e). We know the problems. We know the timings. People do feel left out of the process. They feel that they do not have any say. They feel that they are not being listened to. That is not to say that consultation means you hear everything that everybody says and they get whatever they want. Governments cannot afford to acquiesce in that way. And governments should not. They should adhere to proper planning principles. But people need some certainty, as does the government, as does industry, as does business, so that we can all move forward together.
There are a couple of timetables in this: a master plan for Kambah by September 2011, reporting back to the Assembly by June 2011 with the results of (e), the process of meaningful development and the priority list. We look forward to the minister carrying out these objectives and everyone, particularly the people of Kambah, getting a better deal out of this motion today.
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