Page 1501 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.33): I want to speak on this matter, mainly to congratulate Mr Coe on the superb way in which he has handled a very difficult issue. I think that we on the Canberra Liberals’ side have learned a great deal in dealing with these issues from our experience in relation to the Hawker shops. The meeting that Mr Coe conducted the other day was built on the experience that he and I had of conducting a similar meeting in relation to the Hawker shops.
On both those issues, the real points of concern for most of the people are parking and traffic and the process that is gone through to deal with these issues inside the Stanhope Labor government. I think that the take-out message is that people in the community believe the Stanhope Labor government does not listen to their concerns and is not interested in issues, especially around parking and traffic.
Mr Coe called and conducted a very successful meeting the other day. It was extraordinarily well attended and was conducted in very good spirit. I have been to a lot of planning meetings in the 15-odd years I have worked in this building, and I have been to planning meetings where people were shouted down, where people thumped, where people turned off the microphones and all of this. This was a meeting that was conducted in good spirit and with good grace, and everyone had an opportunity to air their views. There were a couple of people who were a bit persistent in airing their views, and they eventually sort of wore out their welcome to some extent with some of the other people. But Mr Coe conducted himself and conducted the meeting in a very good spirit and it was, overall, a very polite meeting.
It is interesting to note the five or six pages of comments that Mr Coe and his staff collected at the meeting about the issues that arose and, as was the case with the meeting that we conducted in Hawker, Mr Coe has presented these as the views of the community and passed them on to the government in the same way. And he has done what we should be doing here, which is passing on and ensuring that the views of the community are made known to the government.
We may not always agree with all of those views but it is the right of people who elect us and who pay our salaries to have us be their intermediary, and I think that Mr Coe did an extraordinarily good job in bringing together the disparate views at that meeting. I think the take-out message from that meeting was that there was no opposition to the notion that the site should be redeveloped but the site should be redeveloped in a way that is sensitive to the substantial investment already made by the De Marco family in the redevelopment, the extraordinarily welcome and vastly improved redevelopment of the Jamison centre, which is now a place which is much frequented and much appreciated by the people in our electorate.
I think that the clear message was that people want to see the investment that has been made in the Jamison centre not undermined by thoughtless processes at the margins of this new redevelopment, and there needs to be care taken to ensure that parking and traffic issues in the area do not undermine either the current proposed development or the past development, the redevelopment of the Jamison shopping centre. It is a fine road that we will have to go down to meet that quite high standard.
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