Page 4353 - Week 13 - Thursday, 11 December 2014
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All of this, Madam Speaker, is why capital metro is the right decision for Canberra. That is why the Labor Party campaigned on light rail in 2012, that is why we are delivering capital metro now, and that is why we will continue to invest in public transport across our city. Light rail is part of an integrated transport strategy for Canberra, and capital metro is part of our vision of renewal for our suburbs.
Madam Speaker, as a long-term Canberran, I have lived in almost every part of this city. When my parents first arrived in 1977, young graduates destined for the public service and the teaching profession, our very first house was in Macgregor in west Belconnen. We then moved to Flynn and, as the family expanded, to a larger home in Kambah. At that time, Canberra was a town of just 200,000 people, and I have to say, even as a young child, some of those houses felt like they were on the very edge of civilisation, on the absolute suburban fringe. After living in Weston Creek and Woden and studying in the inner north and in Belconnen, in the end I have settled in Dickson, one of the real centres of change in our city.
There is so much I fondly remember about the lifestyle that Canberra of the late 1970s and early 1980s provided and so much that we have successfully retained. But we have not done so by locking everything up or changing nothing. I believe the real genius of Canberra is that we have got the balance right, and we will continue to keep the balance right.
Canberra’s garden suburbs and our urban villages are in my blood and they are in my bones. We do not have to choose between them. Canberra can retain the best of the idyllic amenity of the past—but only if we can grow to become a modern, dynamic city with a strong urban core. We can build new urban villages. We can build new, affordable housing in Molonglo, in Gungahlin and in the inner north. And the economic returns on land in these areas and the efficiency of service delivery they achieve are vital to preserving the garden suburban lifestyle of space and security that so many Canberra families treasure about life in this place, between the hilltops and ridges of our home.
For a time in my younger days we were moving almost every six months, in short-term rental, through Stirling, Chapman, Torrens, Hawker, to name a few, in just a few years. The pressures of affordable rental and affordable buying in a relatively high income economy are not new to me.
The city government’s authority over development approval and land supply means our policies and practices have an inevitable impact on the value of existing homes and the price of getting into the housing market. I am determined to make the best of modern suburban design, innovative policy and reformed taxes, Madam Speaker, not only to support dynamic and vibrant communities but to keep maximum downward pressure on the cost of housing, especially for private sector workers and middle and low income earners. Our policies cannot change everything, but they must—they simply must—make things better.
Our territory government is, in one important respect, unique in Australia: we deliver both state and municipal services. I have spent many years in this building as an
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