Page 190 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 11 February 2015
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and also the Centrelink offices. This local hub provides a real opportunity for these organisations to work together and to work with vulnerable families in particular across the region, cross-referencing each other as they provide wraparound services for vulnerable families.
As a local member, I am looking forward to working with all the school communities, in particular in Gungahlin. I am pleased to be part of a Labor government that has in its DNA to know how important it is to invest in our children and to prioritise education and health investment.
Gungahlin is a diverse community with people from many different backgrounds. It is also a community that is diverse by age, with the full range of accommodation needs that that comes with. Indeed the first retirement village in the region, The Grove at Ngunnawal, will open in coming years. I am also proud that the Labor government invested $2.4 million for land release and infrastructure to support this new retirement village.
As I have noted in this motion, and as I indicated yesterday in my inaugural speech, I am looking forward to continuing to engage with the Gungahlin community on behalf of the Assembly. Since my election three weeks ago, I have visited the Communities@Work offices, spoken with local businesses, held a mobile office in the town centre, and tonight I will be attending the Gungahlin Community Council. I learn something new every day and I look forward to that continuing.
I finish on the point about investing in the future: investment to date has been significant. What these investments show is that this Barr Labor government know how to invest in the future. They know how to build a community. I congratulate the government on their investment in the future but I also know that that does not stop now. There has been great investment in our bus route, but I know that this is not sustainable in the long term. The investment in capital metro is real investment in our future—in our sustainable future—in our productivity and in our community.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Health, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Capital Metro) (4.33): I am very pleased to speak to Ms Fitzharris’s motion on the infrastructure needs in Gungahlin. As one of the city’s newest regions, it is right and appropriate that any government needs to make significant investment into a growing community in terms of both community facilities and infrastructure. We are a growing city. In the past hundred years we have grown from fewer than a thousand people and we are now fast approaching 400,000. We need to plan for the future. In Gungahlin, rapid population growth is projected to continue. We have already seen an increase from just over 300 to over 50,000 in the past 25 years. To put those projections into some perspective, we are anticipating that Canberra will need to accommodate double the growth experienced in Gungahlin over the next 15 years. We must plan our infrastructure provision, our transport planning and other service delivery in this context.
The north of our city is one of the final areas for greenfields expansion. Gungahlin suburbs are growing at five times the rate of the rest of the ACT. In 2013 ABS data
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