Page 105 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 27 November 2012
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One of the things that perhaps we should truly work towards coming out of 2013 is a sense of where we are going. The government has done its consultation on Towards 2030 and there are a lot of documents there. There is a lot of consultation there, there are lots of comments there, and there are lots of ideas there. But I do not get a sense that we have actually taken that work and put it to something useful. If I am wrong, I am sure the Chief Minister will correct me, or if it is about to be revealed then I will be delighted to hear what it is.
But we do have consultation and sometimes it seems to be consultation for consultation’s sake, and consultation can be a two-way street, of course. With these goals that the government has outlined on their “Vision and Goals” page, there can be an education of the community as to whether or not they think they are the appropriate goals and how they will work with us to ensure that these goals are achieved.
Centenaries by their nature only come every 100 years or thereabouts, so it is important that we do not miss this opportunity. You might get to 125 and 150 and 175 and 200, but it is important that we use this. In many ways, I think goals 5 and 6 are perhaps the two that we need to address the most. Goals 1 and 4 in many ways will build into those—what the lasting legacies of community value are and what the impetus for the future development of the national capital is—because it is truly only with the community that we can go ahead.
I have said in other venues that one of the movements around the world is that cities are now adopting charters, as it were—almost constitutions for the city—a charter about what sort of city they see themselves as, where they are going, how they want to get there, how they might want to pay for it, and perhaps something that might come out of a year like our centenary next year is that at the end of the year we have a coming together of the community to say, “These are the things we value. These are the things we want to protect. We know we have got to pay for it. Here is a way that we as a community all agree on what we might take to get to the outcome.”
This is important. For instance, if light rail is to go ahead, one of the consequences of light rail is that you need density, and most people are fine with density as long as it is somewhere else, but we have got to have the density along the corridor. So are the residents who live on either side of Northbourne Avenue in Dickson and Lyneham going to agree that density in their part of the rail corridor is the right place? Are they willing to have four, five, six storeys going 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 metres out from the actual light rail route, whatever it may be?
That is a question that we have got to ask, because otherwise these things will not work. So it is a great opportunity to have a reasonable conversation, and it is not a conversation that should be rushed. Some of the initial work has been done. If members have not read Towards 2030, it is worth going through all of the documents there. There are a lot of recurring themes there; there is a lot of repetition from people. But what we need to do now is tease that out so that, if we are going to create impetus for future development of the national capital, 2013 is not a bad place to start.
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