Page 1553 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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We also talked a bit about infill strategies and policies and we noted that it is now up to 30 to 70 per cent rather than 10 to 90 per cent, which is an improvement, and I personally would say that while we did not have time to talk about it much we actually need to have a lot more sophistication about our infill and our development priorities. Simply saying within a distance from Canberra, from Civic, is not sophisticated enough. We do have other town centres, Woden and Belconnen in particular; Tuggeranong and Gungahlin as well. Concentrating all of our development or half of our development 7.5 kilometres from Civic is certainly of some use but, although I am not a big fan of greenfield developments, I think that we are in a position in Canberra where we can get more sophisticated conversation and look at all the town centres and the transport nodes rather than simply a distance from Civic.
As I said, there are a lot more issues which are of interest and that the committee touched upon very briefly, but in the limited time that we have for our hearings these are really all the recommendations that we had. I commend the report to the Assembly and I look forward with interest to the government’s response.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (12.25): Firstly, I would like to thank committee members for their participation. The chair was Mary Porter and the deputy chair was Ms Le Couteur, who in the last couple of months has really been acting as the chair. I thank her and of course Nicola Kosseck and Lydia Chung for the support they provided.
Firstly, with regard to actually how the hearings were conducted, it was disappointing that we had to wait until this year, 2011, to hear from the planning minister, and also to get back answers to so many of our questions on notice. It would have been preferable to have had both those things occur late in 2010 when the rest of the hearings were actually conducted.
The deputy chair has already gone through a number of the recommendations, and I would like to just touch on a few of those. In particular I would like to touch on the recommendations as they relate to ACTION. For a long time we heard that one of the reasons ACTION could not give information about the timings of their service and about general operational standards was the poor ticketing system, which meant they were not able to collect the data. Now that a new ticketing system is in operation we do expect a better level of information coming from the bus network. Our recommendations 8, 9, 10 and 11 really are linked to that insofar as ACTION should be able to provide better information and we expect that they will be able to report as such in the annual report and also give third parties who are interested in actually complementing the ACTION network the data that can easily be provided.
Recommendation 17 is particularly relevant for today, given the minister is going to be preparing a paper on master plans. There are a considerable number of vagaries about the stage of master plans, neighbourhood plans and precinct codes and that is why recommendation 17 was included in this report—we think the community really does want some clarity about where they actually sit in the entire planning process. Furthermore, we would also like to know what is the status of the existing plans which are out there, to again give certainty to people in the community who are interested in the future of their communities.
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