Page 536 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 18 February 2015
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Mr Assistant Speaker also talks about things that have not happened yet, and he is very keen to talk about the upgrade to the Cook shops. But as we all know, secretly, this is an initiative which is very much on the never-never. You say, Mr Assistant Speaker, that this will be completed within two years. I was told by the minister six months ago that it would be completed within two years. Does this mean that there is a rolling two-year time frame which means that, like tomorrow, we will never get there?
Meanwhile, business owners have to continue to wait for an upgrade to their shopping precinct, one that is nearly half a century old. And this is not the only shopping precinct. There is a lot of consultation, drawing of plans and putting together schemas and artists’ impressions, but the shop owners around Belconnen are left deeply disappointed, as the shop owners in Florey and Evatt are, because they have been enticed by artists’ impressions but they have nothing to show for it. And there is no funding, even on the never-never, for shopping centres such as Florey and Evatt, where there are demonstrably great needs.
As I said before, Cook is more than half a century old. As we all admit, it is looking a little run down. It is not very inviting for the local residents to visit the shops and it makes it hard for local businesses when the physical environment is as challenging as the economic environment.
In the budget, in relation to shop upgrades there was $2 million over two years to be shared for refurbishments between Cook, Rivett and the shops at Mannheim Street in Kambah. Mr Rattenbury has told me that the Rivett shops refurbishment would get the lion’s share of the budget allocation, which also had to fund, as I have been told by Mr Rattenbury’s office, future strategies for co-funding shopping centre upgrades. I deplore the fact that we would be looking at co-funding shopping centre upgrades and having the private domain being upgraded at the same time as the public domain is. But this is a very vague thing and it seems—
At 6 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.
MRS DUNNE: My concern especially about the Cook shops is that the development is so on the never-never and there are so many other claims on that $2 million that I fear that there will be very little, if anything, left by the time we get to the Cook shops.
A conspicuous absence in Mr Assistant Speaker’s flyer is any statement about the urban amenity of Belconnen, and this is what I want to concentrate on here today. All members of the Assembly get a lot of feedback about urban amenity, and it is breathtaking, when Mr Coe and I and Mr Hanson and I and others go to the shops, that we are constantly bombarded by people who will come to talk to us about the failing urban amenity in Belconnen: the footpaths, the grassed areas, the infestations of weeds, the general rundown appearance of many of the local shopping centres, their parks and playgrounds, the presence of rubbish in recreational areas, dirty blocks and many other issues.
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