Page 2061 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 15 May 2013
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representations on behalf of people in Page in relation to the former Page service station site. When you add the other problems in Page, with its proximity to the Belconnen town centre and Belconnen markets, it is a shopping centre that has been in decline for many years. It has not had a supermarket for the best part of 10 years. The tavern from time to time struggles. Some of the food shops there struggle from time to time and they have a high turnover. Of course, it has the enviable and longstanding restaurant, perhaps the second Vietnamese restaurant ever established in the ACT. The Vietnam Village Inn is still providing great takeaway for the Dunne family on a semi-regular basis and a great service to the community. That restaurant and the tavern are the only things that are really keeping the shopping centre going. The new tavern owners are really putting in a great effort to improve the ambience in that area.
Mrs Jones is right, and it was interesting that she had the same thought that I had. We did not actually consult on this part, but she has the same thought about the New York approach to no broken windows. If you go around and fix up the vandalism or you fix up the daggy sites, there is less chance of there being vandalism in the suburb. I did note that Minister Burch talked about this yesterday in relation to vandalism at schools. If you go around and fix it up, it sends the message that we do not tolerate this. So if it is good enough for our schools, it is also good enough for our service station sites and some of our shopping centres that are associated with those service station sites which are in decline.
I think that it is a substantial policy failure and a failure of the leasehold system that work is not done to bring leaseholders to book and ensure that this land is not left forever languishing with nothing being done on it. Mrs Jones talked about the Rivett situation, which is a problem there. For me, Page has been a long-running problem. It is a problem for the shop owners who are there because there is vandalism. It is a problem for the church which is there because there is this large site on three corners of three streets where it is dilapidated, there are falling-down bits of hoarding, and all of this creates an impression that vandalism is fair game, and everyone around suffers as a result of that—in addition to it being an eyesore.
Really, what we need is a coherent way forward. First of all, Mrs Jones is seeking information. The minister has given some explanation as to how he cannot provide all of that information. But, really, perhaps the leaseholders need to be required to do a certain number of basic things—keep the site clean, make sure that it is not a place where vermin can breed, if it has got construction fences around it, ensure that they are in good order, ensure that the hoarding on the construction fences is in good order, that it basically looks as clean and tidy as it possibly can while this work is being undertaken.
The people who are living in the suburbs around these sites deserve some basic information. They deserve to know whether remediation is going on at that time. They deserve to know whether the remediation is complete, because once the remediation is complete, they have a reasonable expectation that the government would do something about compelling leaseholders to do things with their leases.
I have stood in this place on a number of occasions and we have had debates in this place about people getting around the provisions of the land act and the like who are
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