Page 1588 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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The Property Council, through their national CEO, is very keen to see targets—10, 20, 30-year targets. But what they were more keen to see is, of course, the participation of residents. That is why they have launched this “make my city work” campaign. If people are interested, they can get online and see these reports. They are at www.makemycitywork.org.au. You can sign up. There will be discussions and newsletters coming out. But it is important that people participate.
I want to read the last couple of paragraphs from the press release that the ACT CEO of the Property Council, Catherine Carter, put out yesterday:
We’ve seen findings this week from a recent Auspoll survey that rates Canberra as the nation’s most liveable city after Adelaide.
But the survey also found that Canberra citizens rank our city poorly on having a vibrant cultural scene. And more than 75% of Canberrans believe we do not have a good range of quality affordable housing in this city.
The survey also found that most Canberrans believe the ACT government is doing a poor job in terms of:
• Making housing more affordable;
• Setting a fair level of taxation when people buy or sell properties;
• Supplying infrastructure to keep up with demand; and
• Managing urban growth.
These are important issues, members. These are things that we should be taking heed of. What we should be doing is aiming to make it not just a good place to live but a great place to live. As a planned city, we do not have some of the burdens that places like Sydney and Melbourne do. They suffer from infrastructure that was started a couple of centuries before the last one.
What we have is a very fresh approach. What we have done is set up good infrastructure. It is about maintaining it. It is about allowing access, particularly for young families, to get into the housing market. It is about having a city heart, which this government has done nothing to further over the last decade.
They got a report in 2001 from the OECD. It has sat on the shelf, largely ignored, because the planning minister knew better. Well, the planning minister did not know better. The results in this report show that people want a cultural heart, they want a city heart, they want affordable housing, they want better transport, they want infrastructure to be keeping up with demand and they want a fair level of taxation.
None of those things have been delivered after 11 years of Labor government and none of those things will ever be delivered under a Labor government, because they play to the sectional interests and they do not have a concrete vision for the long term. Where they have put forward documents, they contain nothing but motherhood statements without any plans to deliver, without any targets that one can measure their progress against, and without any commitment to make it happen.
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