Page 1159 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 7 May 2014
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and regressive budget that is now being put to bed by Tony Abbott and the Liberals, we know that our population, because of its size and the level of births that are occurring in our city, will continue to grow. And other factors, such as household formation, will drive demand for more housing, more services and more facilities.
This is a big challenge for us as a government. As a responsive government, we are acting, placing them at the forefront of our policy agenda and addressing these challenges to strategic and statutory planning action and investments for the future. Planning has a critical role to play in helping our city to develop as a prosperous, healthy, safe and sustainable place. Our centres and our suburbs, and the social and economic infrastructure that underpins them, are an important focus for everyone in Canberra.
That is why we, as a government, have put in place a comprehensive policy setting to respond to these issues and to address and guide our decision-making on these important challenges of population growth and the demands that come with it. There are documents like the ACT planning strategy; the implementation of the city plan; transport for Canberra; and action plan 2, which outlines our response to the greenhouse gas profile of our city. All of these are critical policy frameworks established by this government to meet the challenges and needs of the future.
Community involvement is important for good urban integrated planning. The government has a comprehensive consultation regime through which various planning proposals are assessed—as well as individual development proposals, of course. The government engages with key stakeholders—individually, face to face, as well as through forums such as the Planning and Development Forum and peak industry and professional groups.
The Planning strategy itself is the overarching policy document to guide the future development of our city. It focuses on a more sustainable pattern of growth. As our city grows in terms of population, the urban area faces pressures. We can either grow in a smart way or we can grow in a dumb way. We can either simply continue to push more and more suburbs out onto the urban edge—with all the challenges and problems that presents, environmentally, socially and economically—or we can focus on more growth and more housing being accommodated in existing centres; we can do it the smart way. We can have smart growth in our centres, which means there are more people on the street, more people walking and cycling, more people using public transport, and greater convenience for citizens, so they are close to their jobs, closer to their shops and services, closer to cultural activities and able to spend more time in the active life of the city, rather than being stuck in the car doing the commute.
Those are the challenges for our city, and we have a comprehensive framework to address it—none more so, perhaps, than the city plan document itself, which delivers on a key objective of the ACT planning strategy to create a more vibrant, active and 24-hour city centre. It is designed to bring new life and impetus to the city centre, and to drive and inform individual policy decisions about new facilities, new services, new development and better public spaces.
The plan identifies five priority projects for immediate commencement.
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