Page 2269 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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On the issue of greater growth in Canberra, we need to see greater growth in our built environment, and we certainly support growth in our town centres, growing a true city heart. But that growth has to be coordinated and it has to be appropriate. We have to make sure that when we grow Canberra, we are providing the densification in the right places so that it actually grows the city and makes the city workable, makes it viable, makes it vibrant, rather than trying to spread it all over the place—New Acton, west basin, city to the lake, all the way up Northbourne. Where is the coherence in that, may I ask?
When we are building in our suburbs, we need to make sure, as in places like Uriarra or Yarralumla, that the development that occurs is sympathetic with the character of our suburbs. Clearly, when you speak to the community, they are very concerned about what is clearly the government’s agenda to squeeze every single drop of tax that they can get, money from the budget, on those developments.
We want to see economic growth. We want to make sure that the businesses in this town are not encumbered by regulation. If you talk to people that want to invest, particularly in the building sector in this town, what they will tell you is that the government does everything to make their life hard. When they want to actually build, when they want to develop, when they want to create jobs and create wealth and build our city, they find that at every step there is a government road block. We have talked many times about the planning regime in this town and how it is an encumbrance to development, and things like the lease variation charge that has proved to be a tax on prosperity, a tax on development, a tax on growth.
As I said, the second thing we want to do is have a better-connected Canberra. The government would say, “We are building light rail. That is better connecting Canberra.” Light rail in 2020-21, from Simon Corbell’s published figures, will, at peak hour, service less than one per cent of our population—hundreds of millions of dollars, $600 million. I think that is a very conservative estimate that no-one believes. It will be closer to a billion dollars to service less than one per cent of the population, and that one per cent of the population are already, most of them, on buses. Most of them are already on public transport. So you are actually only talking about several hundred people in addition to the people that are already on public transport, for nearly a billion dollars. That is not a good way to connect Canberra.
If we are going to connect Canberra, we have to make sure that we are investing not just in the public transport sector—make sure that we have a much better ACTION bus network—but also in roads and parking, because if you go out and talk to people in our community about what they want, they want to make sure that there is available and affordable parking. Increasingly we see an agenda from this government to try to squeeze people out of their cars to try to make their light rail system or planned system more viable.
A more livable Canberra is about lower cost of living and improved government services. Cost of living is a real factor in people’s lives, and I know that we had the statement from the Chief Minister a little while ago telling them to turn off their Foxtel. Andrew Barr’s response to Mrs Jones’s explanation of families living tough is:
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