Page 1552 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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am very much hopeful that the upcoming budget will see something positive happening there.
Recommendations 8, 9 and 10 were a series of recommendations about ACTION and reporting of ACTION data. We basically felt that ACTION needed to lift its game on reporting on timeliness and whether buses were cancelled or not. There seems to have been a recent increase in cancelled buses, or certainly an increase in complaints about cancelled buses. We felt that ACTION could report better with its then current system than it was, but we felt it could do even more as it was just about to introduce an electronic ticketing system. There will be a lot more data available, so we would like to see better reporting and better targets. This is well within ACTION’s capabilities.
We echoed the complaint which I made again yesterday that ACTION does not provide bus timetable data to third parties in a useable format for other applications. This is something ACTION could and should do. It is not party political. Everyone can recognise the usefulness of having good bus timetable data available to the public—even ACTION recognises it; it just has not as yet done it.
Our next recommendation was about Yarralumla Creek and, as someone who at the end of high school traced all Yarralumla Creek as part of a school project, I find it very distressing to see that it has turned into a concrete drain. We would like to see TAMS seriously look at restoring Yarralumla Creek into a natural creek bed, and this is particularly timely given the activities at the development which is called Woden Green, in which the ACT government through the LDA is a partner.
Moving along, we commented on housing affordability and we were asking for more information about this. While our recommendation asked for more information, housing affordability is something that the committee is concerned about, as I would imagine most residents of Canberra would be.
There are a couple of recommendations relating to ACTPLA. Recommendations 17 and 18 seek to clarify the intent of various parts of the planning regime master plans, neighbourhood plans and precinct codes and their statutory import at present, and this goes back to the debate which we had last night. While quite a few of these things are clear to the Planning Authority, unfortunately I do not think they are clear to members of the public. We are asking for clarification on this. It is fortunate that the minister last night did give some clarification, but I do look forward to the government’s formal response.
We then had a series of recommendations about the technical variation process and, given there are three of these recommendations, it is pretty fair to say that the committee is quite concerned about the process and we are concerned about the borders of when it is a technical variation and when it is a full variation and when it is just a minor change which can be made to the existing plans without either of these variation processes. Crace and Casey were the particular technical variations which we were talking about, but our concerns I think are wider than that—certainly my concerns are wider than that. It is something which I have previously made representations to ACTPLA about, and it is an area where the committee feels that we do need more information.
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